I wrote previously about my concerns over GoDaddy business practices. I am a GoDaddy customer. So I sent in a support email about this issue. I received a call from the Office of the President. I commend GoDaddy for the prompt response.

I hoped that I would be able to retract my story after getting all the facts. I cannot do that. The call was a disappointment. There was nothing substantially new.

GoDaddy said they have a different due process for other kinds of abuse or complaints about copyright, slander, etc. But if the matter involves financial or child abuse they can and will act quickly. Their action was approved by their attorneys.

I consider GoDaddy's action unreasonable, remote, extreme, and lazy.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. It's easy to bring up the specter of child abuse. Just like terrorism. You can use that to justify almost anything. I have worked with law enforcement at all levels, including the U.S. FBI, on child abuse. MySpace account names and passwords are a security breach. But they're not life and death. They do not equate with child abuse. Portraying them in that light only degrades the real problem and tragedy of child abuse.

Next, the registrar is not the proximate cause for the publishing of illegitimate web content. It is quite remote. They didn't cause the message to be stored. They are not the hosting provider. They were not even the DNS provider. The registrar has no responsibility and no liability. What's next, will complainants start attacking ICANN for overseeing the Internet, building owners for renting space to the hosting provider that provided the account where the file was stored, the telecom for providing the bandwidth, the manufacturer of the hard drive where the data is stored? This is way down the bottom of the slippery slope of responsibility.

The shutting down of an entire domain with hundreds of thousands of pages because of one bad page is not just extreme, it's absurd. If GoDaddy was not able to take an appropriate response, then it should have taken no response.

In summary, it's lazy. GoDaddy could have taken a thoughtful and measured response that balanced the complaint with the welfare of its customer and the effect and extent of GoDaddy's responsibility and possible actions. GoDaddy didn't. It took the easy out and killed the domain. When GoDaddy takes unilateral and extreme action for something so remote, it is hard to have faith that they'll be reasonable in the future.

GoDaddy's response by their PR department in the press and their staff in my phone call demonstrate no regret or apology over the incident. They show little understanding of these issues, and no interest in learning from it. So I repeat my message from my initial letter, buyer beware. Sometimes when you select a low cost vendor that sells itself based on T&A, you do get what you pay for.