Go Daddy, the net's largest domain registrar, is infamous for its Super Bowl ads featuring busty models testifying at a fake congressional hearings, but when the company's top lawyer testified at a real hearing Wednesday about the company's decision to stop selling .cn domain names, it wasn't a publicity stunt.
At least not according to Christine Jones, who announced the company's decision to stop reselling Chinese top-level domain names at a meeting of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
"We were having to contact Chinese users to ask for their personal information and begrudgingly give it to Chinese authorities," Jones told Congress. "We decided we didn’t want to become an agent of the Chinese government."
"It would be very difficult to say we don't track publicity at Go Daddy because we do," Jones told Wired.com on Thursday. "This is not the Go Daddy PR machine cranking up. You can point fingers at us around the Super Bowl, but not here."
Go Daddy has been selling .cn domain names since 2005, but in December, the Chinese authority that controls its country-code top-level domain announced it would begin requiring that new domain holders provide a photo, their Chinese business license number and Chinese ID numbers. That's in addition to the usual name, address and phone number required by most top-level domain authorities.
That made Go Daddy uncomfortable, according to Jones. But when the authority required that it collect that same information on pre-existing domain name holders and forward that to Chinese authorities, Go Daddy decided it would stop selling the .cn domain names.
The top-level domain (TLD) .cn is one of the most popular in the world -- signifying that a company has a real presence in China. But, it's not a big business for Go Daddy, which has only registered some 27,000 names from about 1,200 unique individuals.
At $30 a year for a domain name, that equals about $800,000 in registration fees annually. That's a tidy sum of cash, but not a big chunk of the company's income given they recorded $750 million in revenue in 2009. The company is the registrar of record for more than 40 million domain names, and has a large business hosting websites and selling SSL certificates.
By contrast, Google is estimated to pull in about $500 million in revenue annually in China, and makes more than $20 billion a year globally in revenue from its tiny text ads.
When Go Daddy informed the previous registrants, some protested the new requirements -- while others simply ignored the request, according to Jones. Those who ignore the request could have their domain-name registrations deleted.
The company then decided it would stop selling the .cn domain names -- while continuing to administering the existing ones.
Jones says the company made that decision well before Google decided on Monday to redirect traffic from its censored Google.cn address to its uncensored search site based in Hong Kong. (Hong Kong has technically been a part of China since 1997, but as a Special Administrative Region, it remains largely independent and immune to Mainland China's strict press and censorship regime.)
As for accusations that it was simply jumping on the publicity that Google's decision received, Jones says the company made the decision independently.
"I wish we had," Jones said jokingly. "We were trying to find a way not to send the information and trying to find out how can we get around it, but we couldn't find a way. So we just said, 'We don't want to be their information collector.'"
Go Daddy does talk regularly with Google about China, Jones said, but "our decision was internal."
Go Daddy was also a target of the December hacking attacks, which targeted some 20 companies, and led Google to publicly announce it was no longer willing to run a censored search engine in China.
In Go Daddy's case, websites it hosted experienced denial-of-service attacks that Jones described as "more sophisticated and well-resourced" than the run-of-the-mill attacks it fends off daily.
Jones' full testimony can be found here (.pdf).
Photo: Go Daddy General Counsel Christine Jones, courtesy Go Daddy
See Also:
- Go Daddy Stops Selling Chinese Domains Over Censorship Concerns
- Christians Bailing on Go Daddy Due to 'Immoral' Advertising
- Google Turns Up the China Burner, Microsoft Feels the Heat
- Google Fights China; Will Yahoo and Microsoft Follow?
- Google Hack Attack Was Ultra Sophisticated, New Details Show
- Google Uncensors China Search Engine
