Desperation: Go Daddy calling customers, begging them to stay
Not to keep beating a dead horse (or elephant), but Go Daddy continues to screw up with its latest PR effort is to let you know that it was just kidding, and that it doesn't really support SOPA.
Context & Ripple Effects
Go Daddy spent most of December on the Congressional list of SOPA supporters, and the fallout has been measurable rather than rhetorical: registration data published the same day shows customers initiating domain transfers away from the registrar in volume. The company's response — a statement that it no longer supports SOPA, echoed on its own blog and picked up by Techdirt, Gizmodo and others — has landed badly, with the 'we were just kidding' framing reading as a retraction under pressure rather than a change of heart.
Timing sharpens the stakes: Go Daddy agreed in July 2011 to be acquired by K.K.R. and Silver Lake, so a public revolt by its core technical customer base arrives while the company is mid-transition under private-equity ownership. Techdirt's same-day roundup notes law firms also pulling their names from the SOPA supporters list, suggesting Go Daddy is the loudest instance of a broader crumbling of declared support.
First-order effects
- Go Daddy staff are now personally calling customers who have initiated or threatened transfers, an expensive manual retention effort aimed at stopping an exodus already visible in the transfer numbers.
- Customers weighing a move get leverage they rarely have with a incumbent registrar: their departure is public, counted, and being reported as news.
Second-order effects
- Rival registrars become the default beneficiaries, able to court fleeing Go Daddy domains with transfer promotions and anti-SOPA positioning at near-zero acquisition cost.
- Every other company named on the SOPA supporters list faces the same calculus Go Daddy just failed: stay listed and risk a coordinated boycott, or retract and look like it caved.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, legislative position lists become de facto consumer-brand liabilities for internet infrastructure companies, forcing firms to treat policy stances as marketing decisions subject to customer veto.
- For private-equity owners like K.K.R. and Silver Lake, the episode is a case study in how quickly a portfolio company's political posture can translate into churn — a risk factor no registrar deal model had priced in.
The trend: The SOPA backlash is turning corporate support lists into consumer battlegrounds, where infrastructure companies discover their policy endorsements are revocable by their own customers.