Go Daddy Took Down 36,000 Pharmacy Sites Last Year

Registrar’s General Counsel testifies on Capitol Hill.

Go Daddy Executive Vice-President, General Counsel, & Corporate Secretary Christine Jones testified before The United States Senate Committee On The Judiciary committee today.

The hearing was titled “Targeting Websites Dedicated To Stealing American Intellectual Property.”

While her testimony provided many examples of how domain name registrars such as Go Daddy fit into the enforcement puzzle, I found the numbers she provided very interesting:

– Go Daddy took down 36,000 rogue pharmacy sites in 2010 alone.

– It received 13,000 abuse/infringement claims last year

– It suspended 7,000 websites which were determined to contain content that infringed the rights of a trademark or copyright owners

– Go Daddy locked over 5,500 domain names that were the subject of trademark disputes or UDRP proceedings, and ultimately transferred more than 3,200 of those names

Jones noted that there are five groups that need to work together to keep infringers and counterfeiters off the internet: registrars, hosting service providers, payment card processors, Internet service providers,
and online advertising providers.

Without coordination with others, criminals can easily just switch to another registrar if they get shut down by Go Daddy.

Jones also said that Go Daddy would like orders for disabling a domain name to be directed first to registrars instead of registries. She said:

The registry in many instances has no knowledge of these highly confidential and sensitive matters, and we have experienced several occasions in which the sudden disabling of a domain name by a registry disrupted weeks or months of work by law enforcement agencies who were investigating serious criminal activity by the registrant.