GoDaddy has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. It all started when it expressed support for the American Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) internet censorship which no one in their right mind would support, unless they have a vested interest like the RIAA/MPAA or News International (Rupert Murdoch) and especially not a company that is in the business of supporting the very infrastructure of the internet, such as a domain registrar. They initially made this surprising statement in support of SOPA:

This bill cannot reasonably be equated with censorship. This bill promotes action pursuant to preexisting criminal and civil laws. Not only is there no First Amendment concern, but the notion that we should turn a blind eye to criminal conduct because other countries may take oppressive steps in response is an affront to the very fabric of this nation.

However, there was a very predictable and severe backlash from everyone that wasn't a vested interest, which would have likely resulted in GoDaddy winning the race to the bottom and going bust Real Soon Now. Therefore, GoDaddy were forced to backpedal furiously on their true feelings in this press release as a damage limitation exercise.While it appears that most of the backlash has been averted, there must still be a significant number of defections, so GoDaddy have started playing a little dirty by thwarting domain transfers to competitors. They have done this by supplying incomplete WHOIS information to those competitors, a practice that is expressly against ICANN rules. This has been claimed by competitor Namecheap in a blog post today:

We wanted to give our customers a quick update on the status of domain transfers associated with one of our competitors, GoDaddy.

First, we're very sorry that some of you in the past 24 hours have experienced delays in transferring domains over to us.

As many customers have recently complained of transfer issues, we suspect that this competitor is thwarting efforts to transfer domains away from them.

Specifically, GoDaddy appears to be returning incomplete WHOIS information to Namecheap, delaying the transfer process. This practice is against ICANN rules.

We at Namecheap believe that this action speaks volumes about the impact that informed customers are having on GoDaddy's business.

It's a shame that GoDaddy feels they have to block their (former) customers from voting with their dollars. We can only guess that at GoDaddy, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Don't worry - each and every transfer request will be processed manually by our team. Every request will go through. We won't rest until everyone who wants to join the Namecheap family can do so!

***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!

It's obvious that dirty tricks like this are going to be picked up very quickly by their competitors and shouted from the rooftops. This will tarnish their damaged reputation even more, so one wonders why they even bother with knee-jerk actions like this. Perhaps it was that arrow to the knee that did it?