GoDaddy has a disturbingly anti-customer behavior when it comes to complying with the requests of government agencies. For instance the company took down a Mexican protest site without providing any definite reason of why it did so. Later, Homeland Security was found involved.
The website in question is 1dmx.org, a site which was meant to highlight the high-handed brutality of President Nieto’s government against activists and students alike. It was essentially an aggregation of all videos which showed the Mexican authorities brutalizing the protesters.
But then in December 2013, GoDaddy suddenly took down the site. The company provided a fairly dumb excuse of how the protest site ‘violated the terms of service’, a blanket term used by host companies to lay it thick on their customers. Naturally, the admin behind the protest site asked GoDaddy for more details as to why their site was taken down. Upon such repeated inquiries, GoDaddy finally revealed that the site was part of a criminal investigation overlooked by the Department of Homeland Security’s office in the Mexico City.
Frustrated over such irrelevant and unexpected charges that led to the take-down of the site, the 1dmx team launched a lawsuit. However, government agencies including the Homeland Security involved in this fiasco, have tried to hide behind no-statements and similar other tactics to avoid the legal penalty.
Interestingly, there have been hints that Mexico’s Federal Police was somehow involved in the take-down attempt. That makes sense, given that federal police in Mexico is sure to have contacts with their counterparts in the U.S. which they could have used to broker a deal. Typically, such deals involve some form of give-and-take. In the case of the protest site for example, Mexican Federal Police may have handed crucial information on wanted persons to the U.S. officials and in turn, have the protest site taken down.
GoDaddy quietly unbanned the website in April this year, claiming that the investigation was over. The company has been notoriously involved in such random take-downs and needs to endure a couple of civil action lawsuits costing a hefty sum before it gets some sense of customer rights and decides to offer its services to its customers first, not to the law enforcement agencies.
Courtesy: The Verge
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