From: David Lawless
Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2004 9:28 PM
<...>
That's pretty easy to match out with a perl regex. It's obvious
that spammers will gravitate to the ultra-low-cost registrars
like Godaddy. I don't know ANYONE I want to correspond with who
needs to buy their domain for $9.95 ($3 for bulk purchased
domains; I'll bet $1 can be negotiated if you're willing to buy
1000+ domains).
Last year, I switched to GoDaddy from VeriSign for two reasons, neither
of them having anything to do with money.
1) GoDaddy was taking a very strict attitude towards spammers and
revoking domains rapidly upon proof of network abuse. While other
registrars had anti-spamming clauses in their AUP's, GoDaddy enforced it
"with extreme prejudice" while the others took their sweet time, if they
responded at all.
But what really go me to pick up and move was:
2) VeriSign, as operator of the root servers for .com, wildcarded all
unused .com domains to their registrar site until intense pressure
caused them to back down. Rather than returning NXDOMAIN for
non-existent domains, their root servers returned the address of their
registrar business that offered to sell you the non-existent domain.
Since countless scripts and spam filters depended on correct operation
of DNS, they instantly broke a huge number of systems and caused people
to accept mail from non-existent domains. Under threat of lawsuits and
extreme pressure from ICANN, they finally backed down but reserved the
right to re-institute this in the future. This company was granted the
right to be one of _many_ registrars for the .com TLD and the privilege
of running the root servers for it, which has an inherent conflict of
interest. They do not own the DNS structure of the Internet, yet they
abused their privileged position to generate sales for their registrar
business, despite the widespread breakage they caused. These guys are
the bums you want to blacklist.
After switching, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my registration
cost was 1/3 of what VeriSign formerly charged, and the customer service
was first rate. I think blacklisting based on registrars is a great
idea. You've just picked the wrong one.
--
Seth Goodman