There's -- I'd now like to pass the microphone to Tim Ruiz from go daddy, who is the vice president of corporate development and policy planning for the Go Daddy group.
>>TIM RUIZ: Thank you, Jonathan.
As I stated earlier, godaddy does feel that using the add-grace period for domain-tasting is a problem.
That is an abuse.
There's been a lot of debate about the economics of that.
That's not our concern.
It's not our concern that somebody's getting something for free.
I think there are some legitimate questions that need to be asked in that regard.
But what our primary concern is, that it's creating customer confusion, that it's threatening consumer confidence in our industry, and that it's costing -- it's causing increased support costs for registrars, definitely for Go Daddy.
We've talked to other registrars just informally.
We'll let them speak for themselves.
But indications are that other registrars are beginning to see similar problems.
So the kinds of support issues that this is creating and the kind of confusion that this activity is creating I'll let registrars -- our customers speak for themselves by just sharing with you a few of the written complaints that we've received from customers.
This first one was directed to our CEO, Bob parsons.
And the customer says, hi, Bob, I've been doing business with you for many years.
On Friday, I checked the availability of something.com from your site as I always do.
It was available.
I had my meeting with the store owner and promised to buy the domain name for him today.
I ran the availability of it again this morning from your site and imagine my surprise when the domain showed as being unavailable and sold to some obscure registrar, and he names the registrar.
I do not believe this is coincidence.
I believe in my heart that you've got someone in your camp that's giving information to someone that's speculating on domain names.
I really hope that you -- you're the kind of person I've always assumed are you and this situation is one you take seriously.
Well, we did take it seriously.
We spent a lot of time investigating this situation, in fact, close to five days working with this customer.
Ultimately, we were able to get the domain name that they were afternoon because it was dropped after it had been tasted for five days.
Another comment, complaint, actually.
I've personally searched on several names which have absolutely no meaning whatsoever.
We assume no anybody else but himself.
All were stolen by some registrar and parsed out to their various subcompanies.
They eventually dropped within a few days.
Either someone internal to your company and/or someone who is in charge of the entire WHOIS system of queries and/or somewhere along the way some bot or worm is intercepting these queries.
Somehow, in some way, these queries are being intercepted and used to some registrars' benefit.
They know it, you know it, we all know it, ICANN knows it.
It's time to put the legal folks with the U.S. government on this.
This has gone too long and too far.
No resolution to the domain names that he was concerned about.
They all dropped, so I would assume that he was able to eventually acquire them.
And, finally, I used to be a proud go-daddy customer.
I registered and bought both a domain name and a hosting space there.
Since I searched for my second domain acquisition in the WHOIS box at Godaddy's site, even after entering my customer I.D. and password five days ago, and tried to make it effective on Tuesday, it came that the dot com I queried and found available the previous Saturday was already registered, delegated, and active since the day after by, and it names some registrar.
I was registering my boss's company name.
He was trying to understand what all that was about.
He doesn't speak English, doesn't trade with credit cards, so had I to accomplish the task.
And he couldn't believe his trademark was registered.
Obvious questions: What, why, how?
What can we do?
Fortunately, in this case, we were able to help the customer get the domain name.
So these are the kinds of things that we're seeing on the rise.
We're not seeing, you know, hundreds of these on a daily basis.
We're seeing probably tens on a weekly basis, but much more than we've ever seen before and related to this activity in the add-grace period.
As this activity continues to grow, we suspect this type of issue is going to grow, this type of confusion is going to grow and our long-term concern is it's going to erode confidence in our industry and what we do for a business.
Those are our concerns.
We feel, you know, there's been some discussion about policy development processes to solve this.
For us, that would be an unfortunate step to have to take, not because we don't have confidence in the policy development process, but, quite honestly, it's resource-intensive, it's time-consuming, and we feel that the tools already exist to put an end to this activity in the add-grace period.
And, again, this isn't about a problem we have with monetization.
We don't feel if we stop this activity in the add-grace period it's going to solve all the problems we're talking about here today.
But it will solve, we believe, the problems that we're seeing right now with customers being confused and losing confidence in what we're doing.
