Their response was awful and rude and completely unprofessional. I never got my domain back.
Based on that experience, this incident doesn’t surprise me at all.
Everyone's website says they're "no bullshit". It's all bullshit.
But at the end of the day it's a cheap provider with, ahem, French-style support so I'm not sure what people were expecting out of them.
Do they have that in their terms? Independently of that, do they have a history of doing that?
Edit; I use (and have been for a very long time) namecheap for registration and (recently) Cloudflare for DNS. I used to host all DNS myself, but that became a bit of a pain with many domains as that's definitely not my core business.
Gandi is the only domain registrar I’ve had an issue with.
I consider GoDaddy to be one of the worst companies in existence, as bad as anyone else you can think of, as free of corruption as current ICANN and as fraudulent as registerfly. Clients looking at available domains have found them immediately registered and squatted at {hundreds}% markup. Their incompetence lost me a few domains, and several freelance clients reported similar -- all of whom were paying vastly over the odds for what they were getting. GoDaddy make Gandi look an exemplar of ideal behaviour for behaving as people are reporting in this HN post.
Their previous CEO had domain squatting and a complete lack of personal ethics as sidelines. That's quite apart from their horrific upsells making a simply renewal a 22 page nightmare of deeply dark patterned "no" clicks against atrocious value "offers".
Avoid GoDaddy at all costs!
Keeping registrar and hosting separated seems like a good idea.
The courts are too expensive. The culture of taking pride in one's work maybe is disappearing.
For the most crucial parts of doing business/living life, we are required to trust someone else. For example, I can't just go and make my own cell phone tower or ICANN.
And yet I can't even trust those entities to get it right.
There's got to be a measurable (negative) economic impact.