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GoDaddy Responds To Namecheap Accusations, Removes “Normal” Rate Limiting Block

107 points by ssclafani 15y ago

tghw 15y ago
There seems to be two different conversations going on here. Namecheap says GoDaddy was "returning incomplete WHOIS information to Namecheap". GoDaddy says it was a rate limiter. In all the work I've done with external APIs, I don't think I would ever refer to being rate limited as getting incomplete results.
JS_startup 15y ago
I think NameCheap might lose out on this PR exchange. GoDaddy's excuse checks out and NameCheap lowered themselves to their level with the accusation they posted. This is very reminiscent of the slapfight that the Bing team had with Google over Microsoft possibly stealing Google's search results. In the end both companies came off as childish and petulant.
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  Did Microsoft's excuse check out, though?
  - sp332 15y ago
    Microsoft used its toolbar to watch which results people actually landed on after doing a search. MS used this to refine their own search results, promoting pages that people tended to "end" their searches on. Google "caught" MS stealing results by manually adding an unlinked page with a unique nonsense string on it into their index. Then they installed the Bing toolbar, searched for the string in Google, and clicked on the only result. Soon after, the same result showed up in Bing. Google claimed that Bing must have "stolen" the search result because it's not linked from any other page, so there was no organic way for Bing to find it. But it seems pretty normal to me.
    - rhizome 15y ago
      But it seems pretty normal to me. This assertion appears to be supported only by your use of scare-quotes around "caught." Is there any further detail you can supply as to why Google's charge should be treated with skepticism? How else would the page have gotten into Bing?
      - kevingadd 15y ago
        His post explains how. Did you read it? Installing the Bing toolbar opted users into gathering data on search traffic (including where a search ended up). Bing used that data to add pages to their index.
      - mikeash 15y ago
        I think the question isn't how the page got into Bing, but whether that's a problem. According to sp332, Google ran their experiment with a Microsoft toolbar installed. That toolbar is reporting back to MS about what you visit, and that's how the page got into Bing. Nothing nefarious there, and not "stealing" results, but simply monitoring users.
        cma 15y ago
        Google never complained about the page getting into Bing. They complained that Bing indexed it with the exact (phony) search term that Google did--Google purposefully didn't include said term on the page itself.
        mikeash 15y ago
        So the toolbar watched their search too. Not exactly unusual.
        cma 15y ago
        they didn't search via the toolbar
        15y ago
- rawrly 15y ago
  NameCheap has appeared to be "out for blood" since the opportunity arose with goDaddy's PR debacle with SOPA. And it's leaving both company's tarnishing their reputation. goDaddy supports a draconian censorship bill. nameCheap jumps in the game and does their best to kick goDaddy while their down for personal gain. The capitalistic dream in action. Want to transfer your domains to a registrar with merit and is actually against SOPA instead of trying to gain customers? Find one who was talking about how bad SOPA was before this debacle started last week.
  - citricsquid 15y ago
    I'm not a customer but I noticed Dreamhost who do domains were publicly opposing Sopa in November: http://blog.dreamhost.com/2011/11/22/dont-drop-the-soap-drop-sopa/ http://blog.dreamhost.com/2011/11/22/dont-drop-the-soap-drop...
freejack 15y ago
These types of things happen all the time behind the scenes. The entire domain registration system is very loosely coupled as it relates to transfers - too loose imo, and breakage is really easy. We had a situation last week where a registrar made a small change to their registrar name and it threw our whois parsers for a loop. From a casual view, it looked like the other end had cut us off, and a quick deep dive made the parsing issue immediately apparent. Domain transfers was an afterthought to the multi-registrar model and was designed and implemented as policy (i.e. ICANN), not as a technical process (i.e. IETF). I wish we'd done a better job in 1999.
- rhizome 15y ago
  Your programmers might want to spend some time implementing some (more) error checking and logging.
  - freshhawk 15y ago
    There is no standard format for whois data, it's just free form text. All whois parsers are fragile and error prone by definition. When i was working in that field a few years ago best practice was to make some guesses, log everything and have a ton of manual checks.
    - astrodust 15y ago
      There's even fewer standards for how to present the address in the WHOIS data. You leave something open to the end user and they will always get very, ah, creative.
  - freejack 15y ago
    By casual view, I mean from the customer side. The change triggered an alarm pretty quickly and from the back-end the cause was pretty obvious and quickly fixed.
    - freejack 15y ago
      hah - as I wrote this, the exact some issue cropped up. Was fixed again within minutes. :)
rhizome 15y ago
GoDaddy's response sounds like "well, if they would have told us what they wanted we might have given them access to secret privileges we have given others." If that's indeed what they're trying to say, it's not particularly reassuring.
- citricsquid 15y ago
  How so? A lot of public APIs work this way, there is a free limit and you can do x requests and then if you want to do more you get the limit raised, I've used a bunch of APIs with a similar limit policy. The only problem is if GoDaddy refused to do this for Namecheap, which doesn't appear to be the case, it seems Namecheap complained publicly first and didn't contact GoDaddy at all.
  - BiosElement 15y ago
    But they didn't, as they stated they didn't. At the end of the day, as Namecheap points out, it's against the ICANN rules to prevent whois's and frankly I wish ICANN had the teeth to trash GoDaddy's registrar status.
citricsquid 15y ago
The "response" from Namecheap is pretty lame, they do not mention that this is standard and that if they'd contacted GoDaddy it would have been resolved and that they didn't before blaming them publicly: > *Update 12:45 PT – GoDaddy has confirmed they have finally unblocked our queries. The transfer queue is being cleared and all transfers should go smoothly from here on. Many thanks to our customers and supporters for bringing this issue the attention it deserved! "finally unblocked" implies that GoDaddy refused to fix it and is at fault, not Namecheap. GoDaddy have always had whois limits as every one who has tried to use their whois system will know (it's a big message on the page)
- biturd 15y ago
  It looks like they did reach out to them, according to this post at least: http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-update/#comment-1709 http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-trans...
hamax 15y ago
A namecheap employee claims that they did contact goDaddy and that they resorted to the PR release only after they couldn't resolve the issue directly with them: http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-update/#comment-1709 http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-trans...
- cperciva 15y ago
  There's contact and there's contact the right people. I have no trouble believing both sides here: Namecheap contacted someone at GoDaddy who didn't know what was going on and didn't relay the message to the relevant people.
pdeuchler 15y ago
While this sounds perfectly reasonable I'm wondering why these rate limits weren't already lifted for a very large, well known, established domain registrar like Namecheap. Further more, it seems that the onus would still be on GoDaddy to investigate the large amount of traffic coming from the whois queries, notice they are legitimate and coming from Namecheap, and rectify the situation... though Namecheap should have contacted GoDaddy as well.
- freejack 15y ago
  Its not as clear when you are seeing traffic from a reseller like Namecheap. I can imagine that their query traffic comes through enom and their own systems depending on the TLD in question.
- teaneedz 15y ago
  I found the community manager response from NameCheap rather interesting. Looks like they did attempt to reach out which is what I would have expected prior to such a blog in the first place. http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-update/#comment-1709 http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-trans...
- astrodust 15y ago
  Volume. Namecheap's query level was probably quite low in the past as people were likely transferring from a variety of registrars, not a single one en-masse.
seanp2k2 15y ago
See, just like I said earlier, Namecheap should have contacted GoDaddy first instead of publicly slamming them without even trying to make it better for their clients.
- eropple 15y ago
  NameCheap's folks have stated pretty unequivocally that they did contact GoDaddy ahead of time. I tend to believe them over GoDaddy. http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-update/#comment-1709 http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-trans...
- BiosElement 15y ago
  They did. Reading helps.

107 points by ssclafani 15y ago

tghw 15y ago

There seems to be two different conversations going on here. Namecheap says GoDaddy was "returning incomplete WHOIS information to Namecheap". GoDaddy says it was a rate limiter. In all the work I've done with external APIs, I don't think I would ever refer to being rate limited as getting incomplete results.

JS_startup 15y ago

I think NameCheap might lose out on this PR exchange. GoDaddy's excuse checks out and NameCheap lowered themselves to their level with the accusation they posted. This is very reminiscent of the slapfight that the Bing team had with Google over Microsoft possibly stealing Google's search results. In the end both companies came off as childish and petulant.

nextparadigms 15y ago
Did Microsoft's excuse check out, though?
- sp332 15y ago
  Microsoft used its toolbar to watch which results people actually landed on after doing a search. MS used this to refine their own search results, promoting pages that people tended to "end" their searches on. Google "caught" MS stealing results by manually adding an unlinked page with a unique nonsense string on it into their index. Then they installed the Bing toolbar, searched for the string in Google, and clicked on the only result. Soon after, the same result showed up in Bing. Google claimed that Bing must have "stolen" the search result because it's not linked from any other page, so there was no organic way for Bing to find it. But it seems pretty normal to me.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    But it seems pretty normal to me. This assertion appears to be supported only by your use of scare-quotes around "caught." Is there any further detail you can supply as to why Google's charge should be treated with skepticism? How else would the page have gotten into Bing?
    - kevingadd 15y ago
      His post explains how. Did you read it? Installing the Bing toolbar opted users into gathering data on search traffic (including where a search ended up). Bing used that data to add pages to their index.
    - mikeash 15y ago
      I think the question isn't how the page got into Bing, but whether that's a problem. According to sp332, Google ran their experiment with a Microsoft toolbar installed. That toolbar is reporting back to MS about what you visit, and that's how the page got into Bing. Nothing nefarious there, and not "stealing" results, but simply monitoring users.
      - cma 15y ago
        Google never complained about the page getting into Bing. They complained that Bing indexed it with the exact (phony) search term that Google did--Google purposefully didn't include said term on the page itself.
        mikeash 15y ago
        So the toolbar watched their search too. Not exactly unusual.
        cma 15y ago
        they didn't search via the toolbar
      - 15y ago
rawrly 15y ago
NameCheap has appeared to be "out for blood" since the opportunity arose with goDaddy's PR debacle with SOPA. And it's leaving both company's tarnishing their reputation. goDaddy supports a draconian censorship bill. nameCheap jumps in the game and does their best to kick goDaddy while their down for personal gain. The capitalistic dream in action. Want to transfer your domains to a registrar with merit and is actually against SOPA instead of trying to gain customers? Find one who was talking about how bad SOPA was before this debacle started last week.
- citricsquid 15y ago
  I'm not a customer but I noticed Dreamhost who do domains were publicly opposing Sopa in November: http://blog.dreamhost.com/2011/11/22/dont-drop-the-soap-drop-sopa/ http://blog.dreamhost.com/2011/11/22/dont-drop-the-soap-drop...

freejack 15y ago

These types of things happen all the time behind the scenes. The entire domain registration system is very loosely coupled as it relates to transfers - too loose imo, and breakage is really easy. We had a situation last week where a registrar made a small change to their registrar name and it threw our whois parsers for a loop. From a casual view, it looked like the other end had cut us off, and a quick deep dive made the parsing issue immediately apparent. Domain transfers was an afterthought to the multi-registrar model and was designed and implemented as policy (i.e. ICANN), not as a technical process (i.e. IETF). I wish we'd done a better job in 1999.

rhizome 15y ago
Your programmers might want to spend some time implementing some (more) error checking and logging.
- freshhawk 15y ago
  There is no standard format for whois data, it's just free form text. All whois parsers are fragile and error prone by definition. When i was working in that field a few years ago best practice was to make some guesses, log everything and have a ton of manual checks.
  - astrodust 15y ago
    There's even fewer standards for how to present the address in the WHOIS data. You leave something open to the end user and they will always get very, ah, creative.
- freejack 15y ago
  By casual view, I mean from the customer side. The change triggered an alarm pretty quickly and from the back-end the cause was pretty obvious and quickly fixed.
  - freejack 15y ago
    hah - as I wrote this, the exact some issue cropped up. Was fixed again within minutes. :)

rhizome 15y ago

GoDaddy's response sounds like "well, if they would have told us what they wanted we might have given them access to secret privileges we have given others." If that's indeed what they're trying to say, it's not particularly reassuring.

citricsquid 15y ago
How so? A lot of public APIs work this way, there is a free limit and you can do x requests and then if you want to do more you get the limit raised, I've used a bunch of APIs with a similar limit policy. The only problem is if GoDaddy refused to do this for Namecheap, which doesn't appear to be the case, it seems Namecheap complained publicly first and didn't contact GoDaddy at all.
- BiosElement 15y ago
  But they didn't, as they stated they didn't. At the end of the day, as Namecheap points out, it's against the ICANN rules to prevent whois's and frankly I wish ICANN had the teeth to trash GoDaddy's registrar status.

citricsquid 15y ago

The "response" from Namecheap is pretty lame, they do not mention that this is standard and that if they'd contacted GoDaddy it would have been resolved and that they didn't before blaming them publicly: > *Update 12:45 PT – GoDaddy has confirmed they have finally unblocked our queries. The transfer queue is being cleared and all transfers should go smoothly from here on. Many thanks to our customers and supporters for bringing this issue the attention it deserved! "finally unblocked" implies that GoDaddy refused to fix it and is at fault, not Namecheap. GoDaddy have always had whois limits as every one who has tried to use their whois system will know (it's a big message on the page)

biturd 15y ago
It looks like they did reach out to them, according to this post at least: http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-update/#comment-1709 http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-trans...

hamax 15y ago

A namecheap employee claims that they did contact goDaddy and that they resorted to the PR release only after they couldn't resolve the issue directly with them: http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-update/#comment-1709 http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-trans...

cperciva 15y ago
There's contact and there's contact the right people. I have no trouble believing both sides here: Namecheap contacted someone at GoDaddy who didn't know what was going on and didn't relay the message to the relevant people.

pdeuchler 15y ago

While this sounds perfectly reasonable I'm wondering why these rate limits weren't already lifted for a very large, well known, established domain registrar like Namecheap. Further more, it seems that the onus would still be on GoDaddy to investigate the large amount of traffic coming from the whois queries, notice they are legitimate and coming from Namecheap, and rectify the situation... though Namecheap should have contacted GoDaddy as well.

freejack 15y ago
Its not as clear when you are seeing traffic from a reseller like Namecheap. I can imagine that their query traffic comes through enom and their own systems depending on the TLD in question.
teaneedz 15y ago
I found the community manager response from NameCheap rather interesting. Looks like they did attempt to reach out which is what I would have expected prior to such a blog in the first place. http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-update/#comment-1709 http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-trans...
astrodust 15y ago
Volume. Namecheap's query level was probably quite low in the past as people were likely transferring from a variety of registrars, not a single one en-masse.

seanp2k2 15y ago

See, just like I said earlier, Namecheap should have contacted GoDaddy first instead of publicly slamming them without even trying to make it better for their clients.

eropple 15y ago
NameCheap's folks have stated pretty unequivocally that they did contact GoDaddy ahead of time. I tend to believe them over GoDaddy. http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-update/#comment-1709 http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-trans...
BiosElement 15y ago
They did. Reading helps.