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Comment by concinds | Hacker News Reader

It may interest you to know that Namecheap, just a few days ago, banned a few domain names purely based on an ambiguous tweet that got 8 likes, that didn't even ask for those domains to be banned or cite any ToS violation.

https://twitter.com/Namecheap/status/1489485337885921284

Namecheap then reverted that decision when they got ratioed (with no tweets supporting their decision). I've never heard of these domain names and don't keep up with crypto, but it doesn't seem like they did much research before banning them.

I was thinking of switching everything to Namecheap just a week ago, because of a friend's recommendation based on their ease-of-use.

Because of this Twitter story, and the Russian suspension, I'm now glad I didn't. You can't cancel users' service, that they paid for, and give them only a week's notice. I'm not Russian but this volatile style of customer relationships totally destroys any trust I could have in them.

View on HN

––– Twitter Conversation –––

[Twitter User A]

  Can anyone explain to me what the @UoT_Foundation is?

[Twitter User B]

  Track the wallets. Where do they go? They all sound like pretty catchy marketing names to me [...]

  All registered on Namecheap within 5 days of each other. All from Iceland (IS). Two of them using pretty much the exact same AWS nameservers. Hmmm. This isn't even tracking wallets.

[Namecheap.com]

  Hello! We have suspended the abusive services

–––

Wow! To be able to terminate someone's domain with a few tweets. This is absolutely insane! I have many domains with Namecheap. I might reconsider my domain provider after this.

Thor project is run by scammers. Good move NC

That’s for a judge to decide, not some helpdesk intern.

A private company is free to enforce their terms of service. You have no reason to imply their actions are uninformed by saying they are an "intern"

I am moving my domains off NameCheap too. This is ridiculous behaviour from a for-profit organisation; the only transaction I am interested in with Namecheap is I give you money and you act as the middle man in registering my domain.

Spare me the political and social grandstanding. I am not interested in your views on either topic.

It looks like Namecheap has 1700 employees in Ukraine and an office in Kharkiv: https://www.namecheap.com/careers/ukraine

Spare him!

Some people are getting bombed and invaded.

And you complain about moving domain names.

God I hate web developers...

And namecheap banning russian TLDs will not stop the bombings, will not stop Putin, and will not help Ukraine.

I hate people who think they can solve geopolitical problems with SQL commands.

Trade and economic sanctions each chip away at the Russian oligarchy, who Putin does listen to.

"Stops bombs" isn't the minimum bar for behavior affecting change.

What happened to "business owners have the right to refuse service or turn away customers" ?

> Spare me the political and social grandstanding. I am not interested in your views on either topic.

Like it or not everything is politcal

I guess it goes both ways, doesn't it? Cos do what they want, and so do customers. All us 3rd parties can do is shrug our shoulders.

This "Mean Girls" style of running a company is not something I'm willing to accept even for remotely important services.

Banning access by the country bombing your offices and employees seems rational. How is it "Mean girls" behavior?

Country != It's citizens that are paying for the service

The taxes of those citizens are being used for the bombs being dropped on the homes of namecheap employees. Continuing to provide services for their profit is not harmless.

Owning a domain name does not necessarily increase the citizens taxable income in any way.

Removing access is indisputably harmful.

It's scary how many organizations are just straight up outsourcing their decision making to Twitter.

it's just marketing with feedback, and it's hardly the scary part. Elections are being decided on twitter

Reminds me of the time they flagged my account as fraudulent and locked me out of my domains. They ignored me until I blew them up on social media, then they said it was a mistake. I am a US citizen and do not do anything out of the ordinary. This was back in 2016. I immediately moved my domains away.

I'll be closing my account as well, thanks for letting us know about this.

They banned doxajournal.ru, a student news organizing publishing anti-putin information.

There are hundreds of cases like this. Namecheap is by far the worst registrar I've had the displeasure of using.

I guess you've never been exposed to Network Solutions.

Thanks for sharing. I won't be using Namecheap for anything of consequence.

Me too. I was feeling pretty bad seeing this announcement, but after seeing several examples of how this is a cowboy operation, I'm finding it hard to take them as seriously now. Move on, avoid, and remind people why I do so in the future when this has blown over.

My concern is not with them banning Russia. I think that's fine.

I'm more worried about them banning accounts over random twitter posts.

Indeed, banning Russia could be argued is an understandable position.

But banning accounts over somebody's tweets, that is madness.

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