Tom Cheredar, at Venturebeat:

Hosting and domain registrar company Go Daddy has lost more than 37,000 domains in the past two days due to the company's wishy-washy stance on the Stop Online Piracy Act.

They could have been more careful here; did VB interview these customers (even a survey of a few percent of them) to determine the reason behind their transfer(s)? If so they don't say they did.

If you click through the VentureBeat story to their source, you'll find Michael H. Berkens noting:

It should be noted that on Thursday more domains were transferred into Godaddy.com (17,000) than left the registrar.

And their source reports about domaincontrol (GoDaddy):

It is listed as a nameserver for 32,177,969 domains and is listed as the primary nameserver for 32,159,050 domains.

So, 37K/32M = 0.00115625, or 0.1% of GoDaddy domains. Is that a trend?

noteworthy wrote:
So, 37K/32M = 0.00115625, or 0.1% of GoDaddy domains. Is that a trend?

I doubt it. SOPA protest transfers will most likely be a hiccup on their average in and out numbers over time.

Registrars that are touting special offers for entering a code with your transfer will be able to quantify on the receiving end. I'm sure they will bleat about the "victories," possibly sharing their aggregate in numbers with the out numbers, but I don't see that lasting for long once the offers of discounts start expiring.

One interesting play might be other registrars going into a cartel agreement on pricing against GD to force slimmer margins. I'm not sure if that's legal but it would be a more long lasting effect.

noteworthy wrote:
So, 37K/32M = 0.00115625, or 0.1% of GoDaddy domains. Is that a trend?

Whatever it is, it has been enough for GoDaddy to respond and it has generated a lot of press that is likely visible to other supporters of the legislation.

The impact for GoDaddy is more significant than for, say, Walmart or Polo Ralf Lauren. First, people researching a registrar decision are liable to happen upon boycotts in Google searches. Second, people making registrar decisions tend to talk with technorati, who may now steer them somewhere else.

Unfortunately, I think their response is weasly. They are no longer officially supporting the bill so they can say that to try to talk customers out of transferring, but at the same time they haven't really acknowledged that they understand the negative consequences associated with creating centralized internet censorship infrastructure.

Maybe the difference between "We're going to let someone else take a leadership position" and "We were totally wrong about this" is a couple orders of magnitude larger boycott. I tend to think the difference has to do with spending a couple of hours thinking about the consequences of what we're talking about. But then, I guess none of the management teams's rich friends risk having any of their well known interests shuttered, so why should they care about the rest of us, right?

Decius wrote:

Hosting and domain registrar company Go Daddy has lost more than 37,000 domains in the past two days due to the company’s wishy-washy stance on the Stop Online Piracy Act.

GoDaddy has apparently dropped its support for SOPA, FWTW. Very little in my opinion. Reports are that they are calling customers who transfer to beg them to stay.

Its only been two days and its the holidays. Its going to take a while for this to fully work through. I certainly don't have time to switch right now and doing so is going to take several steps in order to ensure that nothing goes down.

I went with Namecheap, just submitted a transfer from Godaddy for my 10 domains. I used the discount code "SOPASUCKS" for a little money off.

If you move your domain on 12/29, they will also donate $1 to the EFF for each domain moved:

Namecheap's Move Your Domain Day Promotion

When the transfer completes I will completely cancel my Godaddy account and let them know why I switched.

Comcast is next. Haven't had time to switch home ISP yet but my current billing period ends mid January, I intend to be off of them by then.

It's time to stop giving the bastards your money if you can help it.