Radio Godaddy - Grant W Laird Jr.1].pdf · Blog spamming tools ICANN Meeting With: David Lawrence...

Radio Godaddy April 6, 2005 transcribed by storytype.com Copyright 2005 Godaddy.com

Radio Godaddy

Date: April 6, 2005 Subjects: NTIA and domain privacy Strange domains Blog spamming tools ICANN Meeting With: David Lawrence and Bob Parsons Guests: Christine Jones Warren Edelman _________________________________________________________________

BOB All right. We’re live on our second show. Welcome to Radio Godaddy and the show is not on the air yet, so we’re talking to those listening to our live stream. This is Bob Parsons here, president and founder at www.godaddy.com. I’m here with attorney Jones. . .

CHRISTINE Hi there.

BOB . . . and Chief Operating Officer, Warren.

WARREN Howdy.

BOB All right. We got a few minutes here to talk about some strange domains. We thought we’d talk about domain names that. . . You know, we got eight million of them in our portfolio right now. Eight million out of a total of a little over fifty million registered. So that makes us far and away—our group—the largest registrar in the world. And you could be sure that out of that eight million, we’ve got some pretty strange ones. So anyhow, we selected some that we talk about and you know, you just can’t talk about some of this stuff on the radio without having the FCC on you. And I don’t know that we’re really going to do anything like that, but some of these sites are pretty strange. So here’s our first strange domain. Now this is something that I would never think about. I mean, you know, I go places and I look at art and I look at statues and I think, George Washington, what a hero; or, Saint Louis in St. Louis, you know, what a great guy he was. It never occurs to

http://www.godaddy.com/


me to walk up to the St. Louis statue which is—you know, Saint Louis, he was a knight on a horse. It never occurs to me to go over and fondle the horse and get my picture taken.

CHRISTINE Well, let’s hope not.

BOB All right? But if you want to see that sort of thing, you can go to statuemolestors.com. And the home page has got a picture of—oh, man—it’s got a gallery of lunatics here and you can vote for your favorite one. It’s got an oriental woman at a cigar store with a. . . What’s she doing with that wooden Indian?

WARREN He seems happy.

CHRISTINE He’s got a big grin on his face.

WARREN Bringing him back to life.

BOB I don’t know, but anyhow, she’s very happy. And people go to travel and as they travel, they fondle statues—or, molest statues, or whatever you can possibly think of with statues. Have their photos taken, send it into this site and see if they can make the top fifty. Attorney Jones, let me ask you a question: Is it illegal to molest a statue?

CHRISTINE I guess that depends on what you’re doing to them, and which jurisdiction you’re in. But this nice young Asian woman appears to be massaging the Indian’s knee.

BOB Certain the Indian is of age. He looks like an older Indian. He’s not an Indian boy.

CHRISTINE He’s not a young child, so apparently that’s not violating any laws there. There may be some property law violated, but probably not.

BOB Yeah, I cannot get over the look on her face. All right. So much for statue molesters. Now, the next one is a little milder. I’ve actually heard of this domain name before. And it’s called wheresgeorge.com. And the whole purpose of Where’s


George is, it’s a site that tracks one dollar bills by their serial number. What you do is. . . You know, remember when you were a little kid and you had money and your mother would say, “Don’t put that near your mouth, you don’t know where it’s been!”

WARREN I agree with that.

BOB Well, you would, but wheresgeorge.com will tell you—in many cases if you have the serial number—where it’s been. And then of course as you enter you enter your serial numbers, it asks you where you are and then you add to the trail of the money trail. And you can see how these dollar bills are all over the place. And according to them, they keep tabs on 60,517,000 bills and the next update is going to be done in eight minutes.

WARREN What’s the top ten? George’s top ten up there?

BOB George’s top ten. Okay, bills.

CHRISTINE You notice also in favor of our Canadian friends. . .

WARREN Yes, I saw that.

BOB Yes, it’s got the serial numbers. One of them starts with k244. Let’s click on that. Let’s see where that bill has been. Well, Where’s George is not a very fast site, so our patience is over. Let’s see if we can sneak another of them in here real quick.

CHRISTINE You know, you didn’t tell them about your favorite link from the statue molesters web site.

BOB Oh, the statue molesters, there’s a link. But that’s not one of our domain names. That’s another company, but since you mentioned it, attorney Jones, it’s called—and again, this is something that I would never do. . .

DAVID Yeah, version number 0002, here we go. Let’s see what’s going on in Arizona. I understand people are inappropriately touching statues, is that right?

BOB


Well, we’ve been talking about them, David. Statuemolesters.com. It’s. . .

WARREN No one here has been touching them inappropriately.

BOB Nor is it something I’ve ever done or probably ever plan on doing.

DAVID There’s a picture of me floating around the web in a preposterous position with the St. Louis arch. But I’d rather not go into it. I just don’t think it’s appropriate for this hour.

BOB You weren’t near the horse, were you?

DAVID The horse? No.

BOB It’s an inside joke, David.

DAVID Okay, fine. Was there. . . Now, I have this unnatural attraction to the Statue of Liberty. Does that count?

CHRISTINE Oh, yeah. She’s on there.

BOB Yeah, she’s on there and, you know, I didn’t mention it. Trying to be a patriotic American. That was the one thing. . . I was going to let people find that out for themselves.

DAVID All right. So welcome to Radio Godaddy. My name is David Lawrence. That guy over there, that’s Bob Parsons. Hey, Bob.

BOB How you doing?

DAVID I’m doing okay. So during the breaks, there’s always going to be this little special material that you can only get on the podcast. And tonight you’re going to be talking about goofy web sites that are registered at Godaddy, right?


BOB That’s correct, yeah. We’re talking about strange domain names and crazy web sites, yeah.

DAVID All right. So you can only get that if you tune into the podcast. And you can get all that over at radiogodaddy.com. We do this every week where we talk about things of interest on the web, and some controversial subjects that Bob has issue with, and one of those is this NTIA thing. I was reading your blog today. And you know what I love about you? And, you know, this isn’t the mutual admiration society. But what I love about you is that when somebody says something that is critical, instead of going in the other direction and avoiding it, you immediately respond to it because the quicker you get to it, it seems, the quicker it’s dispensed with. You got four or five comments this week that you dealt with in the blog entry. What were they?

BOB Well, one of them was: I can’t seem to find anything anywhere on the internet about this decision that the NTIA made, or, Bob, are you sure you’re not making this up? So what I did was, is actually pulled together all the documents that show exactly what the NTIA did, and the reason that you can’t find it anywhere, David, is because it was all done by the NTIA under the radar. You know what they did? They came to us and said to us—brought us a new contract and said, “You’re not going to do any more private registrations.” And showed us a contract. We refused to sign it and then they made us an offer we couldn’t refuse, Corleone-style. They said, “We either get your signature on the paper, or your brains.” And by that, what they meant was: We could either sign it, or they would take .us away from us and take our 300,000 customers, move them some place else. Well, those customers wanted to do business with us so we were forced to sign the agreement.

DAVID All right. But you made it public. You took those documents and put them on thedangerofnoprivacy.com, right?

BOB That’s correct. It’s under an article called NTIA privacy elimination tricks. The document trail.

DAVID Okay. There were a couple of other ones and the one that caught my eye right away—and by the way, we’ve already got phone calls waiting at 888-880-4004. You say it, Bob. Now you say it. 888-880-4004.

BOB All right, David. I can do that. 888-880-4004.

DAVID See, when you say it, they’ll call. When I say it, I’m just a dog at your lap.


BOB

That’s right. I’ve got that real authority in my voice. Like draws flies.

DAVID So the one that I thought you addressed head-on was this business of the only reason you’re doing this is because if this goes away, you lose income on that privacy thing because you charge extra to keep people’s information private. You came out and gave everybody your income figures for the year.

BOB That’s correct, yes. And what we did is. . . And I’ll go ahead and mention them on the air, our revenue from .us private registrations was $121,000. And that may sound like a lot of money, but when you consider that it costs us about 50% in order to manage a private registration—because there’s many things we have to do with those that we don’t have to do with regular registrations which basically require almost no management. Our margin is $60,500. Our total sales for the year last year was $102 million dollars. So it’s not a significant number.

DAVID You know, it’s not every private company in the United States that reveals their income to prove a point. I mean, you know what I’m saying?

BOB Well, you know, we feel that we need to be up front and we’ve always been very up front about what we’re doing, what our financial condition is, and we actually reveal that almost like a public company does, David.

DAVID All right. Well, if you want to see one of the most honest and frank blow-by-blow reactions to the criticisms leveled against Bob or just the comments made about Bob’s position on the NTIA and their withdrawing the ability for registrars to create public and private registrations at the same time for .us domains, go to thedangerofprivacy.com and go to Bob’s blog which is bobparsons.com. They’re all laid out. What was that? The danger of. . .

WARREN No privacy.

DAVID Thedangerofnoprivacy.com. Thank you. Was that Warren?

BOB That was Warren.

WARREN


That was my seven words, David.

DAVID Warren, please be quiet for the rest of the show.

BOB He will.

DAVID I’m just. . . No, thank you for that, though. Because last week, we tried to get Warren on and we just kept getting pushed back. Warren is the COO.

BOB Now, I’ll tell you, David. Warren is very vocal when we’re off the air and we’re talking about the. . . Whatever we’re talking about. So it’s just something about being on satellite that quiets the man down.

DAVID You think so?

BOB Yeah.

DAVID One other comment on this and then we’ll let it go because we’ve got a whole bunch of things we’re going to talk about. In fact, why don’t you give people the rundown and then we’ll just deal with this one last point. What are we doing with the show today?

BOB Okay. What we’re going to talk about is—Well, we’re pretty much finished talking about the NTIA deal. But I’ve got a couple things I want to mention here before we do a wrap on this. And the first thing is that we talked with representatives of EPIC today. The Electronic. . . My producer’s shaking her head, no.

DAVID Privacy—Electronic Privacy Information Council.

BOB Okay, you don’t want me to say that? I can say that. Okay. We talked to. . . This is a very disjointed mob here, David.

DAVID I understand.


BOB And it’s amazing we even got this show together. But anyhow, we talked to representatives of EPIC today and they’re going to support us. And we’re also reaching out to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They’re very interested in it. And we’re reaching out to others that are very interested in it. So it looks like, at long last, this cry for help on the NTIA privacy elimination with the .us is gaining momentum. Plus I have other news for you. I mean, these guys at the NTIA, David, they’re like the Keystone Cops. Here we are. We took in the. . . I just bought a private .us registration from another registrar yesterday. Now I’m not going to tell you who they are, but they’re not policing this thing at all.

DAVID So you think that they’re just going after you?

CHRISTINE Certainly what it appears to be.

BOB Seems that way.

DAVID All right, Christine, I want to hear you if that’s your comment.

CHRISTINE Yeah, we’ll be happy to talk about that because when we went to Washington, they stood right there and say, “I’ll be darned if you’ll ever sell this .us private registration again,” and here they are today, letting another registrar do it. So it certainly seems to us to be targeting our activities.

DAVID All right. Let’s take a break. We’ll come back. It’s Radio Godaddy. We do it every week. Get all the details on how you can listen to Radio Godaddy on your pod if you’re getting a podcast over at www.radiogodaddy.com. Back in a moment with more. (Break)

BOB All right. Okay. Here we are. We’re back to strange domains. Talking to people listening to us via live stream. Mr. Paxton, do we know how many people are listening to the stream?

MR. PAXTON Not currently, Bob. We’ll get that for you.

BOB Okay, we don’t know. But however many are you out there, if anybody’s out there, we’re going to be talking at least amongst ourselves.

http://www.radiogodaddy.com/


WARREN

You know, the strange domains are so entertaining. Even if no one’s listening, they’re good to look at. That’s what I think.

BOB Our next one here is a bit unusual. This one. . . Again, all these are registered through www.godaddy.com. This is www.deadpeopletastelikechicken.biz and there’s one good thing about this site when you go it and you get past the home page and you go in and you look at it and what you find is a blog that is written in French. And there’s nobody here that understands French. So there’s really not much for us to talk about.

CHRISTINE Well, you know, it’s amazing people didn’t complain about this one if they complained about eating rabbits, but. . .

WARREN I think it says further down how to eat a dead person on a croissant. Look at that. Go up a bit.

BOB So you speak French, Warren?

WARREN It’s that Canadian in me.

BOB French Canadian.

WARREN I’m kidding.

BOB Could this be a French Canadian site?

WARREN I don’t know. But look at those. It looks like it’s “poulet” – Chicken. Then there’s “poussin” – fish.

BOB “La crème de la crème.”

WARREN Yeah. Maybe they’re talking about how a body tastes in relation to those kinds of meats.

http://www.godaddy.com/

http://www.deadpeopletastelikechicken.biz/


BOB Well, enough of that.

CHRISTINE Let’s move on.

BOB Let’s move on. We’ll let the French have that site. Look at this next one. Help a girl fill out her sweater. This is called www.giveboobs.com. And it’s got a lady—you can only see her lips and her elbows and everything in between, and you really can’t see anything because she’s covered up. Not nearly as much as Candace was in our Super Bowl ad, but she is certainly covered up. And she’s got USA written on her with a heart. And she’s got a shot before your help and then today. Before your help, she was a 34A and today, she’s a 34C. Attorney Jones, do those measurements mean anything to you? They don’t to me.

CHRISTINE I’m sure they don’t, Bob. I’m sure you’ve never read anything like that before. But I was kind of thinking that maybe we’d have pictures of the before and after of Toby. You know, the scrawny little rabbit and then after everybody helped, he’d be, like, the nice plump rabbit. Sort of like this woman’s pictures.

WARREN I think what’s good here is an enterprising young woman who had a need and went out through the wonders of the internet and raised $4500 dollars to fulfill her dream of breast implants.

CHRISTINE She’s brilliant. And she looks beautiful.

BOB And she says it so eloquently. She says, “I am full of appreciation for all my fans. You’re quite swell and my cups runneth over.” Now, attorney Jones, I thought when a lady got implants, she would go, like, from a 34A to a 40D.

CHRISTINE Well, that depends on the lady. Usually, those people are named Ginger or Cookie and they dance for a living.

BOB All right. Enough of getboobs.com. We have a show clock here and it seems like it’s stuck. Yes, it is. All right.

WARREN The atomic clock.

http://www.giveboobs.com/


BOB The next web site is www.mulletmadness.com. This is people that have mullet haircuts.

WARREN Invented in Canada, by the way.

BOB Is that right?

WARREN That’s true.

CHRISTINE How do you know that?

BOB I mean, how would you even describe it?

WARREN It’s short on the top. . .

BOB Sort of like a beaver that walked into a weed trimmer.

CHRISTINE I never heard it quite put that way, but. . .

BOB All right.

CHRISTINE So check it out.

BOB Okay, so check it out and you can see celebrity mullets.

ANNOUNCER Are you ready?

ANNOUNCER And now. . .

ANNOUNCER Brace yourself. Here they are.

http://www.mulletmadness.com/


ANNOUNCER

More Radio Godaddy.

DAVID Yeah, if it’s the first hour of the Wednesday night show, the David Lawrence show must be Radio Godaddy. Go to www.radiogodaddy.com to get all of the details on how you can hear it as a podcast, how you can hear the live stream. During the breaks, they talk about things that we don’t hear on the air. There’s a whole other show that goes on off the air, so go check it out over at Radio Godaddy.com. Twenty-one past the hour. Bob Parsons is your host. Bob, we’re talking about the NTIA privacy elimination tricks. And there’s more tricks going on in the 9th Circuit, isn’t there?

BOB Exactly. You know, the 9th Circuit just made a decision that it’s fine for someone to register a domain name that would consist of your trademark for a domain name and have the word “sucks” appended to it and then use that domain name and. . . You know, for example, they could take the name Godaddy and make it Godaddysucks.com and then put up a web site that would talk about Godaddy and the problems they have with the company. And there’s. . .

DAVID Not that that doesn’t exist right now, right?

BOB Well, anyhow, we own Godaddysucks, you know, we saw that coming. You know, what we. . .

DAVID I mean, not that people don’t take company names now and add the word “sucks” to it. There’s GMsucks, there’s Fordsucks, there’s. . .

BOB They do. But see, here’s the thing, David. If they’re smart, any company, any individual that has any presence on the internet and deals with any number of people, what they should do is step up and buy that. You should have David Lawrence. . . And you know, if you don’t, I’m sorry if someone else gets it.

DAVID Sorry if somebody does.

BOB All right, okay.

DAVID

http://www.radiogodaddy.com/


No, go ahead.

BOB Anyhow, you should step up and buy that and then there’s a lot of other names that I can’t say because we’re on. . . You know, we’re on some of these stations that are FCC controlled, right?

DAVID Right, exactly.

BOB Okay, but you should think of those things and you should buy them.

DAVID So it’s a marketing defensive move to do that, is that right?

CHRISTINE Well, absolutely. For $8.95, why wouldn’t you go buy it instead of spending $40,000 to defend a lawsuit and find you can’t get the name anyway.

DAVID See, that’s actually something that we talk about during one of the commercials that runs during Radio Godaddy, is the fact that we’ll be talking on the air about stuff, and we’ll come up with ideas just like that, and just like you did just there, there’s this moment where I go, “Do I say this? Or do I not say this?” Because some goofball listener out there will rush over to Godaddy and grab the domain before I do.

BOB Well, I only thought of it after I said it, David.

DAVID Yeah. You know what? I would be thrilled if somebody grabbed davidlawrencesucks.com. That would just validate my premiere existence in society. But in this case, isn’t it the case that the case in front of the 9th Circuit wasn’t Bosleymedicalsucks.com, it was just bosleymedical.com.

CHRISTINE Yeah, and that’s the really interesting thing about this decision. You know, the 9th Circuit is the 9th Circuit and they do things like this all the time and that’s why they’re the most overturned appellate court in the country. But for them to come now and say it’s okay for you to register a trademark as your sole domain name and. . .

DAVID And only the trademark.

CHRISTINE


And only the trademark, and that the trademark holder has no recourse to go get it is a little bit offensive.

DAVID Doesn’t that fly in the face of cyber-squatting laws and rules?

CHRISTINE Well, certainly if these people—these plaintiffs—had brought a claim under the ACPA, which is the Anti Cyber Squatting Protection Act, they probably would have been more successful and we don’t want to get into summoning legal discussion, but it is an interesting decision on behalf of the 9th Circuit because they are really flexing their muscle as a court and saying, “You know, what? We don’t want the domain dispute resolution procedure to take over the position of courts in deciding these issues and these disputes. We want courts to be the. . . You know, sort of the fact finders and decision makers when it comes to domain disputes. So where the trend was kind of in favor of trademark holders in the UDRP and in WIPO disputes and NAF disputes—sorry to throw all these acronyms out. . .

DAVID No, but that’s okay. World Intellectual Property Organization.

CHRISTINE Yeah, and the National Arbitration Forum. The trend kind of was toward the trademark holders and this sort of flies in the face of that because. . .

DAVID Well, I’ve never understood why Bruce Springsteen. . . Like, how many Bruce Springsteens can there possibly be? Bruce Springsteen was unable to get his domain back from the cybers-quatter that had it.

CHRISTINE Yeah, and that trend definitely with proper nouns has gone in favor of the proper noun holders, assuming you have a name like Julia Roberts or Brad Pitt, or Clive Davis or the ones that we’ve seen people winning recently where the name is so famous that people know it.

DAVID Yeah, Madonna, sure. So in this case. . . There was a case—we had this guy on a couple of times—there was this guy whose name is Bill Purdy, William Purdy. . .

CHRISTINE Oh, we know him.

DAVID . . . who kept buying up domain names like washingtonpostchristian.com and thewashingtonpostjesus.com simply to draw attention to the fact that The Washington Post is a


left-leaning newspaper. He would then take those domains and redirect them to graphic abortion picture sites and the court said, you can’t do that. And that’s the St. Paul courts. The District judge in St. Paul. So how do you look at this and say, “Okay. Here’s a ruling in the north coast of America, here’s a ruling on the west coast of America. They seem to be at odds with each other.”

CHRISTINE This is every lawyer’s dream. It’s a split in Circuits and it’s prime case for the Supreme Court. You know, the Supreme Court has to decide this issue now. So some enterprising young lawyer like Sarah Weddington did with Roe v. Wade is now going to take this case and appeal to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court is going to have to decide the issue.

BOB Well, godaddysucks really doesn’t rank up there with Roe v. Wade, Counselor.

CHRISTINE No, but Bosley Medical might. You never know.

BOB Bosley Medical? Well, you know what? It might. But anyhow, David, here’s the point. There’s two things that all our listeners should do in dealing with this issue, you know. First the courts are going to do whatever the courts are going to do. But in the meantime, you know, we all have to look out for our own rights. So what I recommend is that we use both foresight and that is we think about the different things that we have and that we’re promoting and ways in which they can be used and what we do is, we take the little bit of money that it takes to go ahead and buy the protection that we need, and that is, step up and buy godaddysucks or whatever else you think might be registered and both buy S-U-C-K-S and however else you think it might be spelled. And also awareness. And that is, there are tools that you can get—we have one of them, it’s called deep monitor. Five bucks a year. What you can do, you can run this thing and it will let you know any time anybody uses a domain name that has your domain name encapsulated in it. And then you can go ahead and deal with it right when it first takes place.

DAVID Got you. All right. So you can get all that over at godaddy.com.

BOB Yeah, and I mean, really, that’s the long and short of it.

DAVID Now, when you go over to godaddy.com—I got to let people know this because you told me to—if you use the checkout code DAVID at the end of your checkout when you put the promo code in there, you get a dollar off anything you buy there. Any order on godaddy.com, you get a dollar off using the code.


Now you got a guy down in Argentina. We’re going to talk to him. What’s he doing down there?

BOB Tim is down at the ICANN meeting in. . . some place.

WARREN Mar del Plata.

BOB Yeah, Mar del Plata, Argentina.

DAVID I love the fact today that Nina said, “Hey it would be helpful if Lillie speaks Spanish.” Does she speak Spanish? The answer is no. No, she does not.

BOB Six-hour bus ride, David, it took him.

DAVID More godaddy in a moment. (Break and resume)

AUDIO CLIP Yes, there are some pretty grim prospects ahead of us. A helluva an enemy attacking comes smashing out of the sky at any time and every last one of us will have to be ready to face what happens then. . .

ANNOUNCER And now more Radio Godaddy.

DAVID When I said more Radio Godaddy in a moment, I meant a very brief moment. Yes, a six-hour bus ride?

BOB Something like that. Yeah, right after he landed. I mean, this is in some sleepy little ‘burb.

DAVID Why do they do that?

BOB Well, what they do is. . . ICANN very much wants to be an international organization. And so in


order to prove that they are, they hold their quarterly meetings—I mean, in the strangest places.

DAVID Didn’t they go to Morocco last year? Or the year before that?

WARREN They were in Kuala Lumpur, Morocco, Cape Town.

DAVID It’s insane. I know their general counsel, John Jeffries, and I’ve asked him: What’s the deal with all these third world countries that you go to for these stupid meetings? Why can’t you have them in New York and Geneva and London and Tokyo?

CHRISTINE Well, he doesn’t like it, either, because he has to get a new vaccination every time they go to a different country.

BOB Yeah, Tim’s got more needle holes in him. And David, we send him to these meetings and he flies, like, for 30 hours. He flies coach. And he just sits back there with his brief case and works on whatever he’s got until his batteries run out.

DAVID All right. Well, we’re going to get him up here in just a moment, but we have a call. You’re on Radio Godaddy. Hello.

CALLER Yeah, hi. I was just saying that when you were talking about saying, like, web site sucks at the end of it and then you gave the example about the abortion with the Washington Post. I was just saying that I think it’s completely different to say a web site sucks and then talking bad about it and then making another, like the Washington Post question and going to some completely different issue. I think those are separate issues that you can’t really decide, or they can’t be judged by the same court case.

DAVID So you’re saying that to you, it’s a good thing to be able to criticize. It’s a First Amendment thing to be able to criticize with a web site that says “sucks” at the end, but to take that and redirect people who might think they’re going to the Washington Post site and send them to abortion pictures, you’re not down for that.

CALLER Absolutely. One’s freedom of speech, the other one’s almost copyright infringement.

DAVID


Christine, what do you think of that?

CHRISTINE Absolutely. A very astute observation. That distinction is a fair distinction at law. That’s why William Purdy and the likes of William Purdy put up sites enterprising and driving traffic to their web sites just by virtue of a famous trademark to make political speech don’t win their cases. Whereas, the gentleman who just simply took exception to his hair not growing after Bosley Medical treated him wins his case. It’s absolutely a fair distinction. On the one, you win; the other one, you don’t.

DAVID 888-880-4004. That’s 888-880-4004.

BOB Now, what we need to talk about, David, we need to talk about our spam tool company.

DAVID Your spam tool. . . Oh, yes PHP Soft.

BOB You know, it’s not a company that we own, but it’s a company that has their domain name with us. And what they do is, they make a blog spamming tool, and. . .

DAVID For people that don’t understand that, Bob, could you explain it?

BOB Well, what a blog spamming tool is. . . Everybody knows that if you go to a blog, you can post a comment or whatever you happen to think about, whatever the subject matter the blog is. And what. . .

DAVID That lets people do on your site.

BOB Exactly. And same as yours. But what a blog spamming tool does is, it will send out advertisements—spam—and post them as comments, one after the other. There’s thousands of them on blogs. And sometimes even they get past the best spam filters. And so this company—you reported them to us, as a matter of fact—they make a blog spamming tool.

DAVID Yeah, in my case, I wake up in the morning and I’ve got. . . Most of my web sites are blogs. The David Lawrence Show’s a blog, Online Tonight’s a blog, Legal mp3 Downloads is a blog. And they’re ripe for this kind of tool to be used against because there’s so many different subject


matters that we do on our hot topics. And I wake up regularly to dozens and dozens and dozens—some days hundreds—of these spam comments. So when we take a break, we will come back. And I understand you’re actually going to make a live decision on the air. Is that right?

BOB Well, actually, what they did is. . . Well, we’ll talk about it when you get back. (Break and resume)

AUDIO CLIP How many mouse clicks does it take to put a 20% dent in CD sales? How many clicks does it take before 99% of all music on the web is illegal. How many clicks before the entire generation stops buying music at all? We’ve done the calculation. One. Internet music piracy. Respect the music. A message from Online Tonight with David Lawrence. Respect the music. Don’t pirate.

AUDIO CLIP Remember, once the volume control is set, do not readjust.

ANNOUNCER And now, more Radio Godaddy.

DAVID It’s 26 before the hour. It’s Radio Godaddy. It’s Wednesday night, first hour of the David Lawrence Show. That means it’s Radio Godaddy time and the podcast that we do during the breaks that Bob and the crew there does in. . . This is Scottsdale and Los Angeles getting together feeding the bird and feeding the internet. It’s fabulous. Before we went to the break, we were talking about blog spamming tools. And a particular web site that is registered to Godaddy.com. . . I just found out about it because somebody blogged it. They said, “Here. Check out the Who Is information,” and apparently, Godaddy accepts money from blog spammers.

BOB Of course. I mean, that’s of course what they would say.

DAVID Of course!

BOB Always these things land in my lap, I catch a right hook in the jaw on account of it, and then I got to deal with it.

DAVID


Let’s be clear about this. The domain name is phpsoft.com. So who would know that that was what they were doing. It sounds like a software site. It’s not like somebody put up a site that was obvious—blogspamming.com.

BOB Well, here’s something that we need to point out. First of all, the company became aware that we were going to talk about this on the air, they deactivated their site, so there’s really no decision for us to make. But one of the questions I have is that, is this tool that is used for blog spamming, could it be used for legitimate purposes? Because, for example. . . Let’s say you can’t shoot up a place like sometimes happens. But yet, that doesn’t mean that the gun manufacturers should be arrested or shut down.

DAVID Well, there’s certainly a case in front of the Supreme Court right now where that particular concept of, is what is in question capable of doing something that is lawful, and I think one of the questions—certainly Christine can talk to this, and Warren can talk to this—is, is it designed to do both? Or is it simply designed to predominantly do something that is amoral, illegal, destructive, et cetera?

CHRISTINE You know, our analysis typically in our abuse department would be, what is the purpose of this particular web site? Not what is the purpose of all web sites like this? And what are they using our service for? If they’re using it for illegitimate or illegal purposes, we’ll give them a warning, give them a chance to take it down, which is what these people did, and if they don’t, we’ll take the action to take it down. But maybe Warren, you can talk to whether or not there are legitimate purposes for this.

WARREN I wanted to clarify something. It is actually php-soft.com.

DAVID I didn’t want to give the whole URL out. I just wanted to let them know that it was a generic name.

WARREN I was afraid, David, that people would go to the other site that you mentioned without that dash, and that they would be unfairly judged as a result of that.

DAVID We should be clear about this. Let’s just be honest about all the sites and not try to obfuscate it. It’s php-soft.com. And apparently, what did you send them? A cease and desist letter?

BOB Well, no. We didn’t send them anything because I’ll tell you what, David. Right at this moment,


we don’t know, 100 percent sure, if that tool is used exclusively for spamming blogs.

CHRISTINE That’s true. We never had to do the investigation.

BOB I mean, could it be used for legitimate purposes? And then, you know, that would be like taking a hammer manufacturer and if somebody beat somebody to death with a hammer, and then shutting them down. You’ve got to look at. . .

DAVID I think it’s common sense. I think common sense plays a role here. There’s not a single example that I can think of—and I’m sure others have tried to think of these, to give these people the benefit of the doubt—there’s not another thing that one can think of when all the tool does is obfuscate where it’s being used from, hexadecimally encode the URLs that it sprays all over the comments, and then puts comments in places where the commenting has nothing to do with the subject of the blog entry. So you tell me.

BOB No, I agree with you. That particular use is wrong. All right? But the thing I’m saying is—and we don’t know the answer to this is, are there other uses for that tool that are not wrong? And then, in which case. . .

DAVID So that’s your generic test.

BOB . . . then you have to look to, okay, how people are using the tool, and then you deal with the uses of the tool as opposed to the maker of the tool. Now, I’m not saying we wouldn’t have shut that site down, because if that’s all the tool could be used for, and our research would show that, then we would shut it down. I’m just saying it’s not as cut and dry as maybe we might think.

DAVID All right. So if in fact. . . Let’s take peer-to-peer sites right now. I mean, they’re going through the same thing. These companies that created the peer-to-peer sites made their bones and make their money based on inducing people to use their stuff for the most part—and I’m talking the vast majority, 99 percent or more—it is pirating copyrighted material. And that’s the question that’s in front of the Supreme Court right now. It’s also the basis of the Induce Act that was introduced in Congress.

BOB All right, but you know, let’s point out—that’s not what we’re talking about. That peer-to-peer stuff, right at the moment, there’s an old saying we use. We don’t have a dog in that fight. Literally. And so however that’s going to be handled, that’s going to be handled. And quite


frankly, I’m very happy that I’m not having to be in the middle of a situation where I’ve got to make decisions on peer-to-peer sites. Because I don’t. And I’m thrilled to death about that, David.

DAVID All right, you want to go to the phones?

BOB Yeah, that would be great.

DAVID All right, Charles, you’re on Radio Godaddy. Hello.

CALLER Bob, how are you guys doing today. Dallas, Texas here.

BOB Doing great, thanks.

CALLER Say, on this spamming program, what’s the price on this? Did they not already have that for sale?

DAVID Yeah, it was like, a hundred and some-odd dollars.

CALLER Okay, this program that they use, can you not manipulate the program and use this program. . . For instance, let’s speak hypothetically. The federal government, FBI, wants to communicate with the CIA, the CIA wants to communicate with your local police authority.

DAVID Through blog comments?

BOB Oh, I don’t know. That seems a little farfetched, I must admit.

DAVID But you know what? I’ll spend the next week trying to figure out a single legitimate use for a blog spam tool. I’ll try my very best. And if I come up with one, I will let you know. That one is not on the list.

BOB All right. Again, I’m not saying we wouldn’t have taken that site down eventually, David. I’m


just saying that there’s lots to consider when we’re faced with making the decision. Because I’ll tell you what, I want to do the right thing, I just got to be sure that I know what that is.

CHRISTINE Yeah, particularly in a case where we’re just the registrar and we’re not the hosting provider. We don’t have any responsibility whatsoever for the content, so in order for it to rise to the level of us taking the domain name down, it has to be pretty clear. You see the distinction, right?

DAVID Sure, absolutely. But we had talked about this last week with Save Toby. That’s why I brought it up. You don’t host Save Toby, either. And you had mentioned that if there was something going on that you felt was illegal, that was against your terms of service and so on, you would use the DNS structure to remove. . .

BOB What we would have done is, we would have re-routed the domain name so it just would point to a trouble page and said there’s a problem with the site.

DAVID Okay. So, again, I’m going to spend the week trying to figure that out. We’re going to talk with Tim in just a moment down in Argentina. What is he down there for?

BOB Is down there to be our representative at the registrar constituency at the quarterly ICANN meeting at Mar del Plata.

DAVID And do you have a dog in that race?

BOB Yes, we do. As a matter of fact, we’re very active in the registrar constituency. Since the Godaddy group, our group of three registrars, is the largest registrar group in the world. So we have a lot to share and a lot to say, and we’re concerned that everybody be treated fairly and that we do the right thing.

DAVID It is 18 before the hour. Ms. Von Schtup, are we getting Tim up? Is he on line one? Is that who that is? What’s going on there with him?

FEMALE Yes, David, I do have Tim up on Line one.

DAVID


All right. Let’s get him. Hey, Tim, how’s it going?

TIM Hi, real good, David.

DAVID Speak Spanish for us, buddy.

TIM How about ola, Buenos noches.

BOB All right, Tim. Thanks.

TIM After that, probably no habla Espanol.

BOB Hey, Tim. I got a question: How long was the bus ride to get to the meeting?

TIM You know, I didn’t take the bus. I actually switched airports and flew into Mar del Plata from Buenos Aires. But that was about a 4 ½ hour ordeal in itself. I probably could have taken a bus ride and got here about as quick.

WARREN Was that approved?

BOB Tim, you were supposed to take the bus.

DAVID There was some question as to your budget on that.

TIM Oh yeah? Uh-oh. Okay.

BOB Okay, what time is it there, Tim?

TIM It’s about 11:30, I think. 11:45.

BOB


It’s not a big time—Warren told me it would be about 2:00 in the morning.

WARREN I was hoping. . . We were expecting you to be groggy-eyed, Tim, and waking you up.

BOB Yeah, Warren said that he wanted me to tell you that it would be okay for you to put a cup of coffee on your expense report. But just this once.

TIM Yeah, it’s kind of strange here because dinner doesn’t even. . . The restaurant doesn’t even open till about 8:00 or 8:30 at night. So this is about the time I’m getting back from dinner every night.

BOB Yeah, just like you do on Radio Godaddy show.

DAVID How long are you down there?

TIM Till Friday the 8th.

BOB Tim, what’s the big news? What’s happening down there?

TIM Well, a lot of things are happening. Probably two big topics that I think we’re concerned with that especially affect our customers, the registrants, is Who Is policy changes, and issues with transfers and that whole review process that’s going on now.

BOB Why don’t you say that in English, Tim, so our listeners might understand that.

TIM Well, you know, the issues with privacy. The Who Is is a public database of everybody’s contact information, so there’s a lot of concerns about what might need to change there to help protect registrants’ privacy, and that kind of relates to the portability of domain names between registrars and how you should be able to select the registrar of your choice. And that whole transfer process, or portability process kind of relies on that public Who Is database.

BOB Tim, got a question. Do you stay awake during all those meetings?


TIM You know, for most of it, I do.

BOB Atta boy.

DAVID I’ll tell you, one of the most confusing processes there is, is transferring a domain—or, it used to be anyway—transferring a domain from one registrar to another. I’ve been amazed how smooth it is getting to Godaddy.com. And when we come back, I want to talk about the changes that might be in the offing on that and whatever else is on the agenda down there for ICANN, which is the Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers. So we’ll do that when Radio Godaddy continues. It’s 15 before the hour. Stay tuned. The podcast continues. (Break)

BOB Okay, we’re back with strange domains. And I think this is going to be the last time we’re talking, the last break. And the domain name we have now to talk about is whackyourboss.com. And this is a deal where you click on begin. And a web site comes up and you click anything in the site, and a cartoon character will pick it up and hit the boss. Now he’s beating the boss’s desk with a television, I clicked on. . . or, no. The computer monitor. Wow. So anyhow, this gets pretty graphic. Now he’s listening to an iPod. He’s relaxing. We’re waiting. This is. . . You want a good chuckle, go to whackyourboss.com, then you can click a button, have it playing, boss comes back in. Let’s pick something else. Take the umbrella. Oh, my God, he stabbed the boss right with the umbrella, went right through him. Wooo. All right. Okay, we’re done with this site, he’s back on the iPod.

WARREN Genius.

BOB Mr. Paxton, you got these mikes set right? They seem like we don’t really hear the feed.

MR PAXTON No, we can hear you fine. The microphones are fine. I can always increase the your headphones. We’ll get to that.

BOB Guys if this doesn’t seem really professional, it’s only because it’s not.

WARREN


Our clock is an indication of the professionalism. The new clock.

CHRISTINE We might want to put a picture of that clock up on our web site.

BOB Just so you know, the clock we have in our studio, the secondhand works, but the hour-hand and the minute-hand do not move.

WARREN Yeah, I was thinking the show was going really slow.

BOB It’s a special clock. We got a deal on it. All right, we got a new clock. All right. Okay, a clock upgrade.

WARREN I give it about five minutes.

BOB Okay. Now here we go. The next domain is fidius.org/quiz/pirate. And what this site does is, you answer a quiz and it tells you what your pirate name is. So if you wanted to be a pirate and you weren’t sure what name you wanted, you could go to this web site and you could get a pirate name.

CHRISTINE And is this gender-based? Are there different girl pirates and boy pirates?

WARREN Well, you have to specify she or he.

BOB Now, Nima, our producer, went online and she answered the quiz and Nima’s private name is Bloody Bess Cash.

CHRISTINE What exactly does that suggest?

BOB I wonder if that’s how Lillie von Schtup got her name.

CHRISTINE From the pirate site? Probably.


BOB No, I don’t think so, I think I know how she got her name. Miss von Schtup. Okay, here we go. Next deal we got is. . .

CHRISTINE You’re making the producer nervous, here come on.

BOB Infinitecats.

WARREN No, no. This is the wrong site. It’s infinitecat. Not the plural.

BOB Oh, no wonder I’m looking at this and it makes no sense.

BOB Okay. Infinitecat.com. And infinitecat is. . . If your cat looked in a mirror and had a mirror in back of the cat and, that’s seeing a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, that’s infinite cats.

CHRISTINE Oh, my gosh. You have infinite cats. They get smaller and smaller and smaller, right?

BOB You have cats forever. And this thing just goes on and on. Put this away. Okay. We have 750 infinite cats. Cat number 750 is Zybay. And looking into a computer monitor, and there’s kind of a poem. I don’t know if Zybay wrote it or the owner wrote it. But you can get details on most cats. Plus assorted cat paraphernalia.

WARREN Did you see the alert that in Wisconsin, they’re going to be allowing people to shoot feral cats?

CHRISTINE Right on this web site?

WARREN Right on this web site.

WARREN Anybody who is a hunter can go to Wisconsin and shoot feral cats.

BOB That’s a lovely thing to notice, thank you.


AUDIO CLIP There was a bright flash. Brighter than the sun, brighter than anything you’ve ever seen.

AUDIO CLIP And now, if you’re not ready, did not know what to do, it could hurt you in different ways.

ANNOUNCER More Radio Godaddy.

DAVID Yeah. Ten minutes before the hour. They’re continuing on casting aspersions like we don’t hear them. They think that because I bring them down on the console here in Los Angeles that we don’t know what’s going on. Now, there would be a very powerful part of me that would say, “Don’t let them know that you know what’s going on.” But Ms. Von Schtup would like you to know that she did not get her name at a name-generating site.

BOB She didn’t go to fidius.org.

DAVID No. No. She got her name. . . Now, you’ve seen Blazing Saddles before, right?

BOB “Now, excuse me while I whip this out. . .”

WARREN That’s from Blazing Saddles.

DAVID That is from Blazing Saddles.

CHRISTINE Lillie, you might want to defend yourself here.

DAVID You’re absolutely right, it’s from Blazing Saddles.

MS. VON SCHTUP It’s true, it’s true.

DAVID So during the break, what was the site you guys were discussing?

BOB


We were discussing infinitecat.com

DAVID Infinitecat.com. Just go check it out. And we got a bunch of calls. We want to deal with Tim so let’s finish up with Tim. Bob, what else do you want to know about what’s going on at ICANN?

BOB Well, Tim says he’s mostly staying awake during the meetings and he’s going to be there for a little while yet. Tim, are you making any progress?

TIM Yeah, I think there is some progress. There were a couple of good recommendations made by the Security and Stability Advisory Committee about the transfer process. So hopefully, we’ll see some of those move forward and tighten up the transfer process a little bit and help prevent some. . . We’ve had a couple of big domain name hijackings here lately—panics.com, hz.com. So something needs to be shored up a little bit.

BOB Any of those hijackings involve Godaddy.

TIM No. None involve Godaddy at all.

DAVID Why is that, Bob? I really would like to know, why is that?

BOB Well, first of all, we have very tight controls. And second of all, we’re lucky.

DAVID That’s it? You’re just simply lucky.

BOB No, I didn’t say we’re just simply lucky. I said we have very tight controls and also, we’re lucky.

DAVID Okay, got it. There is every possibility that you may suffer if you go to other registrars. I can tell you there is no suffering involved at all in transferring your domains to Godaddy. And one of the cool things about transferring your domain to Godaddy, is you get an entire year’s worth of registration free when you transfer your domains to Godaddy. And as I said in this commercial, that’s why I put all my domains there because I get the extra year free.

BOB All right. We just love that about you, David.


DAVID

Thank you. So, Tim, anything else before we let you get back to your Buenos noches there?

TIM No, I’m just looking forward to the public forum tomorrow. That always gets exciting. It’ll be open mike, so you never know what will happen.

BOB So what are you going to be talking about during that exciting public forum, Tim?

TIM I’m going to do a lot of listening, but I think from registrar’s perspective, we’re going to make a few comments in regards to the .net agreement that’ll be potentially signed here shortly between ICANN and Verisign for them to maintain the—control the .net domain name.

BOB So Verisign is going to keep .net, you think?

TIM It looks that way right now. There’s been some controversy about the Tele Quarterly Report. You know, the independent review of the companies that have applied for .net. So I don’t think it’s going to be necessarily cut and dry at this point. I think there’s certainly going to be some review of that whole process in that report. So we’ll see what happens. It’s not on the Board Agenda for Friday, so nothing is going to be ratified here in the short term.

BOB All right, Tim. Well, anyhow, we look forward to seeing you come back and hearing your daily news check-in. And you get some sleep.

TIM I’ll do that.

DAVID All right. There you go. There’s Tim Ruiz, our man in Argentina. Let’s go to Bob. Bob, you’re on Radio Godaddy, hello.

CALLER Yeah, it’s Bob from Indiana. I’ve got a comment on the blog spam software.

DAVID Back to the blog spam software, all right.


CALLER Well, I think there’s absolutely no doubt that Godaddy should revoke the domain registration for that site. I looked at the site and read about the software and there’s no question that the primary purpose of the software is web site blog spam. So even if it might have a quote / unquote legitimate use, the primary use of that is network abuse. And network abuse has gotten so bad with spam and everything else, that people are getting turned off to the internet and I think it’s time for people like Bob Parsons to take a zero tolerance approach so that we can get the internet back to where it should be.

DAVID That could be dangerous, couldn’t it, Bob?

BOB Well, you know, what I have to do is, I have to proceed on these sorts of things cautiously. Fortunately, they disabled it. I’m not Judge Roy Bean. So it’s the type of thing where I have to make sure that when we do shut these things down that we’re doing the right thing. Counselor, how many spammers do we shut down daily?

CHRISTINE It varies, but you may have hundreds and maybe even thousands depending on how big a block of domains one individual customer has that get shut down in any given week. So there is nobody to this caller’s point, there’s nobody out there in the industry that’s as affirmatively against spam and network abuse as Godaddy. I mean, nobody.

BOB As a matter of fact, if you go to some of the chat boards that the anti-spam community maintains, they also use our name Godaddy as an acronym—or, as a term for shutting down a spammer. “Why don’t you just Godaddy him?” So we’re pretty active there. But there’s also other times when we have to take a moment or two before we act and kind of think about what we’re doing.

DAVID Any idea of what we’re going to be talking about next week?

BOB Next week the show is open. We’ve got a new product that we’re going to be launching. We believe that it’s going to revolutionize the way domain names are resold. And that should provide at least part of the show. We’re going to be doing strange domains again. And also, we’ll see what happens during the week and we’ll report what’s happening with the NTIA, and that’s about it.

DAVID And Tim should be back, too, right?


BOB Well, yup, Tim will be back, and if he doesn’t come back, he’ll at least call.

DAVID Let’s go over his expense report when he comes back, what do you think?

WARREN Oh, we’re going to do that.

DAVID Okay, it’s Radio Godaddy, everybody. The podcast continues. (Break)

BOB All right. We’re back with strange domains.

WARREN I think we should set up one, timinargentina.com.

CHRISTINE Put little pictures of the Argentinean women down there?

WARREN That’s right.

BOB Exactly, yeah. And then what we can do is, we can see photos of him. . .

CHRISTINE In the public forum comment meeting? Because that would be fascinating.

BOB I hope he doesn’t show up on statuemolesters.com.

CHRISTINE Who are the famous saints down in Mar del Plata.

WARREN You know he’s leaving right now to the bar. In Mar del Plata.

BOB He’s going to be at that very exciting .net meeting.


WARREN That’s right. The .net. . . I think there’s a gathering tonight of the .net constituents to discuss. . .

BOB The .net constituents. And you know, here’s the thing that is absolutely true. Most of them are more serious than Tim.

WARREN That’s true.

BOB He’s one of the lighter guys there. So that’s a very serious. . .

CHRISTINE A dry party going on down there.

WARREN It’s like the worst show you ever saw on CSPAN.

CHRISTINE CSPAN makes this look exciting? That kind of thing?

WARREN CSPAN makes this look exciting, that’s right.

BOB All right. Okay. Got to bring it to a close. One strange domain. nopantsday.com. This is a web site supporting no pants day, is a day where everyone, no matter if you’re students, respectable businessmen or sheriffs, community leaders leave their pants behind.

CHRISTINE But they wear underwear.

BOB You do wear underwear, yes.

CHRISTINE So will we be having a no pants day here at Godaddy one day?

BOB No, absolutely not. Matter of fact, no pants. I think we ought to lose the spandex, to be honest with you.

CHRISTINE


That’s actually a dress code violation.

WARREN Is it a dress code violation?

CHRISTINE Absolutely.

WARREN Spandex? Spaghetti straps?

CHRISTINE Those are, too.

BOB No, I’m talking about people buzzing around in those spandex shorts.

CHRISTINE I understand.

BOB You know, there’s people that should wear them and there’s other people that should not wear them. So you just showed us that brings us to a close two minutes ago.

WARREN That clock is not working, either.

BOB One more. Okay, here we go. One more strange domain. Johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhimanyway.com. Now I have never been able to type all that in and get it right. But that web site actually does exist and it’s a photo of John Kerry pouring beer on papers. That’s all the site is about.

WARREN The other site that you mentioned first incorrectly may have been a great site. We don’t know. We never looked at it, right?

BOB Yeah, you’re talking about nopantsday, no we haven’t looked at it. There’s another one, wasarrested.com. You can. . . It’s a joke site that allows you to input a target name and URL onsite automatically generates a pseudo news article using this name. All right, cut. Okay, show’s over?


FEMALE

Say goodnight, Bob.

BOB All right. Goodnight everybody. It’s been a pleasure. We look forward to seeing you next week. (End)

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