
GoDaddy Responds To Namecheap Accusations, Removes “Normal” Rate Limiting Block - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/26/godaddy-responds-to-namecheap-accusations-removes-normal-rate-limiting-block/
======
freejack
These types of things happen all the time behind the scenes. The entire domain
registration system is very loosely coupled as it relates to transfers - too
loose imo, and breakage is really easy. We had a situation last week where a
registrar made a small change to their registrar name and it threw our whois
parsers for a loop. From a casual view, it looked like the other end had cut
us off, and a quick deep dive made the parsing issue immediately apparent.

Domain transfers was an afterthought to the multi-registrar model and was
designed and implemented as policy (i.e. ICANN), not as a technical process
(i.e. IETF). I wish we'd done a better job in 1999.

~~~
rhizome
Your programmers might want to spend some time implementing some (more) error
checking and logging.

~~~
lambda
The Whois protocol, RFC 812, does not specify the result format returned. The
protocol is actually incredibly simple; you connect to port 43 via TCP, send a
query delimited by a CRLF, the server sends back a plain text, human readable
response.

Now, many registrars use a format that has lines that look like "Name: Value".
But not all do. And those that do will frequently include other text,
including terms of service for using their WHOIS service or providing
instructions. And some don't use a "Name: Value" format, or they allow for
multi-line indented values, or whatnot. Some seem to use "%" to delimit
informational lines, as if it's a comment characters, while others don't
bother to use anything.

So, parsing whois is a bit more like scraping the web than like parsing a real
file format. It can break sometimes.

~~~
rhizome
I understand, and while I do have experience in text processing I would not
want to take on a project like this. The number of people responding about
this raises the question, though: why is this being reinvented so much? My
impression is that everybody writes their own parser, which smells like NIH
syndrome.

------
hamax
A namecheap employee claims that they did contact goDaddy and that they
resorted to the PR release only after they couldn't resolve the issue directly
with them: [http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-
trans...](http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-
update/#comment-1709)

~~~
cperciva
There's _contact_ and there's _contact the right people_. I have no trouble
believing both sides here: Namecheap contacted someone at GoDaddy who didn't
know what was going on and didn't relay the message to the relevant people.

------
pdeuchler
While this sounds perfectly reasonable I'm wondering why these rate limits
weren't already lifted for a very large, well known, established domain
registrar like Namecheap.

Further more, it seems that the onus would still be on GoDaddy to investigate
the large amount of traffic coming from the whois queries, notice they are
legitimate and coming from Namecheap, and rectify the situation... though
Namecheap should have contacted GoDaddy as well.

~~~
teaneedz
I found the community manager response from NameCheap rather interesting.
Looks like they did attempt to reach out which is what I would have expected
prior to such a blog in the first place.
[http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-
trans...](http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-
update/#comment-1709)

------
JS_startup
I think NameCheap might lose out on this PR exchange. GoDaddy's excuse checks
out and NameCheap lowered themselves to their level with the accusation they
posted.

This is very reminiscent of the slapfight that the Bing team had with Google
over Microsoft possibly stealing Google's search results. In the end both
companies came off as childish and petulant.

~~~
nextparadigms
Did Microsoft's excuse check out, though?

~~~
sp332
Microsoft used its toolbar to watch which results people actually landed on
after doing a search. MS used this to refine their own search results,
promoting pages that people tended to "end" their searches on.

Google "caught" MS stealing results by manually adding an unlinked page with a
unique nonsense string on it into their index. Then they installed the Bing
toolbar, searched for the string in Google, and clicked on the only result.
Soon after, the same result showed up in Bing.

Google claimed that Bing must have "stolen" the search result because it's not
linked from any other page, so there was no organic way for Bing to find it.
But it seems pretty normal to me.

~~~
rhizome
_But it seems pretty normal to me._

This assertion appears to be supported only by your use of scare-quotes around
"caught." Is there any further detail you can supply as to why Google's charge
should be treated with skepticism? How else would the page have gotten into
Bing?

~~~
mikeash
I think the question isn't how the page got into Bing, but whether that's a
problem. According to sp332, Google ran their experiment with a Microsoft
toolbar installed. That toolbar is reporting back to MS about what you visit,
and that's how the page got into Bing. Nothing nefarious there, and not
"stealing" results, but simply monitoring _users_.

~~~
cma
Google never complained about the page getting into Bing. They complained that
Bing indexed it with the exact (phony) search term that Google did--Google
purposefully didn't include said term on the page itself.

~~~
mikeash
So the toolbar watched their search too. Not exactly unusual.

~~~
cma
they didn't search via the toolbar

------
rhizome
GoDaddy's response sounds like "well, if they would have told us what they
wanted we might have given them access to secret privileges we have given
others."

If that's indeed what they're trying to say, it's not particularly reassuring.

~~~
citricsquid
How so? A lot of public APIs work this way, there is a free limit and you can
do x requests and then if you want to do more you get the limit raised, I've
used a bunch of APIs with a similar limit policy. The only problem is if
GoDaddy refused to do this for Namecheap, which doesn't appear to be the case,
it seems Namecheap complained publicly first and didn't contact GoDaddy at
all.

~~~
BiosElement
But they didn't, as they stated they didn't. At the end of the day, as
Namecheap points out, it's against the ICANN rules to prevent whois's and
frankly I wish ICANN had the teeth to trash GoDaddy's registrar status.

------
tghw
There seems to be two different conversations going on here. Namecheap says
GoDaddy was "returning incomplete WHOIS information to Namecheap". GoDaddy
says it was a rate limiter. In all the work I've done with external APIs, I
don't think I would ever refer to being rate limited as getting incomplete
results.

------
citricsquid
The "response" from Namecheap is pretty lame, they do not mention that this is
standard and that if they'd contacted GoDaddy it would have been resolved and
that they didn't before blaming them publicly:

> __*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!

"finally unblocked" implies that GoDaddy refused to fix it and is at fault,
not Namecheap. GoDaddy have always had whois limits as every one who has tried
to use their whois system will know (it's a big message on the page)

~~~
biturd
It looks like they did reach out to them, according to this post at least:
[http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-
trans...](http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-
update/#comment-1709)

------
seanp2k2
See, just like I said earlier, Namecheap should have contacted GoDaddy first
instead of publicly slamming them without even trying to make it better for
their clients.

~~~
eropple
NameCheap's folks have stated pretty unequivocally that they did contact
GoDaddy ahead of time. I tend to believe them over GoDaddy.

[http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-
trans...](http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-
update/#comment-1709)

