GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation

It's funny, the only time I can recall a programmer describing something as sexist (towards women) in the early/mid 2000's was somebody describing GoDaddy's booth at a convention. That really stuck with me for some reason, lol.

Luckily in EU, they still hardly depend on presencs validation, therefore all these sorts of errors can be resolved in couple of hours.

It is similar like losing phone or sim or even being in a foreign country where you can't access your number but worse.

I’m locked out of my 20 year old wikipedia account because they instituted 2fa without asking and my email on file was no longer valid.

And even worse, if I wanted to take over npmjs.com tomorrow and godaddy would kinda... just hand it over (?!?!?!) then i could probably become a crypto billionaire overnight

When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well. They're more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases.

That's what makes this particular story so egregious.

Domains are a very funny business. I can't think of anything so crucial to businesses, that at the same time generates so little revenue per customer. Your entire technological infrastructure depends on it, yet it costs $15/yr. Making a single support request can turn you into an unprofitable customer.

If we ask 100 likely buyers family feud style, where would they go buy a domain, GoDaddy likely is going to be the top answer by a wide margin.

They wouldn't know about any bad news/ security incident with the brand either.

> [...] is one of the most competent IT guys I know. The GoDaddy account had [...]

Don't think I've ever heard something good about GoDaddy.

So if you have someone using GoDaddy, and everything is working, how do you sell them on the idea of migrating DNS or hosting or email if they've never had an issue?

I use some square space for a lot of stuff, but it's largely because Google Domains sold out and the price is "fine." Sure, I could use something else, but this works, the cost is correct, and - I can't stress this enough - it already freaking works. I also use a python as a service tool I point at frequently. Their customer service is great, so I doubt this would ever happen there? But yeah, I'm not manually configuring a server somewhere most of the time.

Is it the "best" possible tool for the job? Not really, but it works well enough for the stuff I use and my workflows are already rock solid to deploy code to prod, etc. Is it because it's impossible for me to spin up a VPS or I'm too stupid to figure out Hetzner? Probably. But no, I've done it before, I could do it again, but that would take me X hours that I'm not getting paid for to migrate for limited utility, possible customer interruptions, and stress. I might need to migrate in a year or so, but until then, I'm not going to bother.

I reckon that's a similar sort of thing that happened here and depending on what they're doing business-wise, Lee could be insanely competent IT person and was just unlucky because the hammer he reached out for with GoDaddy actually turned out to be a foot gun that took years to fire.

It happens, it's not ideal, but it happens - I'm just glad they got it figured out and I'm glad that these sorts of events percolate up in the hn zeitgeist, because I definitely know who I won't be turning to in the future. Like, I kind of already knew GoDaddy was trash? I used them something like 10 years ago to spool up a website for a friend of mine. The whole experience was garbage then and I said, "never again" - but also that was kind of at the beginning of me even learning about how this stuff works? But I could totally see a scenario where I get snared into a product ecosystem and the opportunity cost of switching out of it outweighs staying put until it blows up in my face.

A competent IT person can have a backup plan for every expected failure. They can't control registrar level screw ups.

Companies explicitly selling you "bulletproof domains" like MarkMonitor have screwed up big time.

Also as an IT guy, asking to register a new domain with X is much easier than asking to transfer a long held domain away from Y.

GoDaddy is a valid domain registrar. The customer had dual MFA set up. The customer did all the right things.

I’ve never heard of Godaddy making this kind of egregious mistake before. I’ve heard of some doozies, sure, but nothing like this.

Don’t blame the victim. “It’s their fault they got robbed, they left their door unlocked” is not a valid response to a situation like that or like this. The robber still stole, and godaddy still broke their own rules, rules that customers pay to have enforced.

When you find yourself victim-blaming, you will find yourself on the wrong side.

Icann Arbitration seems like the wrong channel, those are typically used for when someone correctly technically registered the domain name, but there's a dispute from the non-owner, e.g:

1- Trademark holder registers trademark.com, malicious actor registers trademark-web.com and phishes. 2- trademark.com expires, and someone registers trademark.com and domainsquats.

This is not the case, all Icann can do is make decisions over who owns a domain. A civil court would be more appropriate for calculating and ordering compensatory damages.

> The Grand Trunk’s problems were clearly the result of some mysterious spasm in the universe and had nothing to do with greed, arrogance, and willful stupidity. Oh, the Grand Trunk management had made mistakes—oops, “well-intentioned judgments which, with the benefit of hindsight, might regrettably have been, in some respects, in error”—but these had mostly occurred, it appeared, while correcting “fundamental systemic errors” committed by the previous management. No one was sorry for anything, because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometric otherworld, and “were to be regretted.”

[0] Going Postal (2004) by Terry Pratchett

That sounds like a nice idea in theory, but: 1/the mistake has been undone, and 2/damages are likely to be minimal. At this point, getting a lawyer involved is going to be a lot of cost without much benefit.