It appears that Godaddy.com charges its customers $50 one of their domains get hit with a UDRP.
One customer is complaining on his own blog.
Daniel Paden tells his tale on the blog Atheiststoday.com, in a post entitled, Stop Using Godaddy, including all the emails he exchanged with Godaddy.com complaining about a $50 fee charged to Mr. Paden credit card when a UDRP was filed against one of his domain names.
“I purchased a domain name to use on a project I was working on. Someone had a problem with me owning the domain name because they thought it would negatively effect them. Whether that is true or not isn’t important really. This person filed a complaint with WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) over the right to the domain name which they have the right to do if they wish.”
“Godaddy charges me $50 because of the dispute. Keep in mind no guilt had been proven to exist it had simply been a case of someone accusing me of being guilty. It could have been someone who had no real interest in the domain whatsoever. Godaddy and DomainsByProxy.com had no factual data on which to base their actions. The dispute should have had no effect on me except that my domain became locked to prevent it from being transferred to another party or evidence being destroyed.:
The only reason godaddy could automatically take $50 from my bank account was because I had auto payments set up to renew my webhosting accounts with godaddy. Those hosting accounts were for domains completely unconnected to the the domain name in dispute.”:
The post goes on to show Godaddy.com response:
“Thank you for contacting us. The domain name B*******.NET has been named in a domain dispute filed through the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO.int). As a result, the domain name has been placed on registrar-lock and will remain locked until we are directed otherwise by WIPO.
We have also charged a $50 fee for processing the legal dispute. You may wish to review our Registration Agreement for more information regarding administrative fees at
http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/legal_agreements/show_doc.asp?se=%2B&pageid=REG%5FSA
This fee is refundable only if the decision is found in your favor.
Kindest Regards,
David Castano
Disputes Administrator
GoDaddy””
After several back and forth email’s Godaddy refunded the $50 to Mr. Paden
In Godaddy’s defense the other issue that really seemed to upset the domain owner is that once the UDRP was filed the DomainsbyProxy privacy service was lifted to reveal the owner of the domain. Mr Paden writes:
“I had purchased identity protection from DomainsByProxy.com. As soon as the complaint was filed they cancelled my identity protection. Those clowns have no idea why a person has purchased their service why would they just drop it and leave a person exposed? In my case it wasn’t a huge deal but it still pissed me off. What if the customer had reasons for using their service that would result in possible harm if their identity was made public. I’m sure that is rarely the case but it is a valid possibility.”
Unfortunately Mr. Paden seemed not to understand that the removal of privacy protection once a UDRP is filed is required by ICANN and part of the terms of the contract which all registrars have to follow to keep their accreditation.
Maybe Godaddy needs to explain this better it their terms and conditions.
That’s bad. I guess if there was no coupons to buy domain names for 1-3 $. then godaddy would not been the choice of most of the domainers…
I moved all domains from godaddy to namecheap last year.
I had enough stupid ads and cop-paste replies from gd customer service – it took ages to fix anything.
Mike this has been happening since I remember go daddy. Maybe for 10 years now.
They also charge you if they think that your phone number is not correct or if someone makes a complaint that your email is not correct. That could be as simple as you don’t want to reply to this person.
I have telling people not to use go daddy since I can remember too but nobody listens. They get what they deserve.
Frankly, another reason to dislike GoDaddy.com. I stripped nearly all my domains from them years ago, after other, unreleated monkey business on their part. I only have a few domains with them right now, and those are being transferred out because GD charges $15 a year for registrations, which is insane. Anyway, thanks for bringing this one to our attention. 🙂
As noted above, GD has been doing this for years. They used to do it for merely receiving a c&d letter, which was always a fun way to make a domain registrant shell out $50, since the TM claimant could just keep sending letters and ringing the cash register.
I made a decision years ago that I could not do business with GD.
If you are the only bidder on a domain in their auction they just cancel the auction.
if I sell a domain – part of the terms are I will not transfer the domain to the buyers gd account. instead I demand pushing the domain and then after the transaction is over they can do whatever they want.
some things in life you just throw up your hands and walk – and for me that is GoDaddy
I wish I read this before, I am in the middle of a painful migration from Moniker to GD…
my luck:)
I’ve never used GoDaddy… I suppose I can see why people do, but the ads always made me think I was dealing with a company on the same level as a pawn shop or strip club joint.
I wonder how many domains have been lost in UDRP by unsuspecting clients who registered the domains, and godaddy decided to park their domains on their parking servers, and collect income from that. Now there is cause for penalty, and a class action.
Seriously Godaddy, stop penny pinching clients like this, how many bad UDRP’s are filed, how many names are attempted to be stolen, and you are adding insult to injury over $50?
GoDaddy refused to pay us about $2,000, I think it was, in parking commissions a few years ago, for two reasons. One is that I had the domain SwineFlu.com forwarding to PandemicFlu.org for one day and then to SwineFlu.info (and there was nothing in their terms and conditions at the time which clearly prohibited that) and the other is that they found one person who clicked on a link at one of the flu domains and also at another domain of ours, a loan domain. This was when the H1N1 pandemic was just starting and SwineFlu.com was getting about 10,000 type-ins a day for several days. All of those domains just disappeared from our Parking account, without notification, and calls were referred to an extremely discourteous woman in their Fraud Department who refused to even say exactly how much money they had clawed back from our account. I was able to get an IP address out of her, of the person who supposedly clicked links on both websites, and was able to trace it to a health care company in California. I tried calling higher up in GoDaddy but was told they could do nothing. I couldn’t believe how unreasonable they were.
About a year and a half ago, my friend got hit with UDRP on a domain that he has owned since around 1998, LegoWeb.com. It was originally just an enthusiast website, which is what is there now. Ordinarily a domain like LegoWeb.com might fall under the scope of ™ infringing domain that hurts a ™ owner. For years the site was left alone by Lego because it actually benefits them and the site just helps bring the lego enthusiast community together.
Here’s where things went wrong and what caused my friend to get hit with UDRP. The credit card the domains hosting account was attached to expired. He was busy and he hadn’t updated the website in more than five years, so he wasn’t really aware.
So when the domain went from being hosted to, a GoDaddy landing page, all of the sudden it is now serving up PPC ads (from which GoDaddy was profiting) that put it into an entirely different scope and was now actionable for Lego.
Ultimately IP attorney Erika Hengst represented Brian, the owner of the domain and within 48 hours of filing her response, Lego agreed to withdraw their UDRP and it was agreed that the original site that was in place would be back in place. They understood that Brian wasn’t aware of the landing page. So now, LegoWeb.com is restored to all its early web design style glory.
I’ll have to check with Brian to see if he was ever charged by GoDaddy the $50 UDRP fee.
I’m not sharing this story to rip on GoDaddy, these things happen when you’re controlling such a large percentage of the worlds domains, but in light of the story Mike posted and comments left by others, it is incredibly ironic and amusing in that “this isn’t really funny” kind of way I felt that I had to share it.
The contact information for the attorney please? I think I need her.
Patti, I’ll reach out to you via FB.
Better yet, heh, Go Daddy ought to stop charging that fee. They used to charge $29 upon receipt of a UDRP, and I guess they raised it now to $50.
But of course, Go Daddy’s T&C says they also reserve “the right to charge you reasonable ‘administrative fees’ or ‘processing fees’ for (i) tasks Go Daddy may perform outside the normal scope of its Services, (ii) additional time and/or costs Go Daddy may incur in providing its Services, and/or (iii) your noncompliance with this Agreement (as determined by Go Daddy in its sole and absolute discretion).”
It should be noted that I had to plead my case to paypal. That is how the $50 was refunded to me. Godaddy didn’t just see the light and hand it back.
I realized the ICANN rules on privacy later on. I agree that the terms of service can and should be re-written. It’s not that hard to make rules clear and easy to understand especially ones that will cost the customer extra fees.