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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

Maybe that's the price of free speech. Namecheap doesn't have any unusual restrictions on what you do with your domain after you buy it. Gandi does. You have to uphold their ethical code and affirmatively fight "deviant uses of the internet" to register domains through them. Hacker News would violate that code, and under the terms of Gandi's service agreement, they could revoke service and cancel this domain if it were registered through them.

http://en.gandi.net/static/contracts/en/g2/pdf/MSA-1.3-EN.pd...

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I really appreciate you posting this information. I had considered Gandi in the past and would not have read their ToS; I'll stay away now.

As for our friend jjblue, you can safely ignore his citation trolling. The rest of us appreciate the warning. There's no point in waiting for victim #1 before telling your friends about danger. Thanks again!

Deviant uses is defined as "spamming, phishing, hacking, cracking, or attempts at hacking or cracking". That's a pretty standard ToS right?

Not at all. Neither is that the extent of the agreement. You agree that you will not use your domain to distribute any information in violation of their ethical code. You agree that you'll also police any 3rd parties with the ability to publish content (i.e. blog comments or forum posts). The list of things you can't talk about on your site include anything "prejudicial", not just illegal. It includes any discussion that doesn't respect the "image" and "honor" of any other person. It includes any discussion inappropriate to the "age and sensibility" of anyone the site is meant to be read by.

That's all from section 3.3 of the agreement. Making your ownership of your domain name contingent upon active monitoring and censorship to uphold ambiguous "moral standards" of a 3rd party is NOT a standard registrar ToS.

You've posted this msg at least twice in the thread (at least one was deleted). Seems you're using the thread in a way that doesn't help HN as much as yourself.

Can you post some examples of this policy being used unfairly? Surely some real-world, verifiable examples would help your case. (And what if the examples are nonexistent... what then?)

Domain registration is a commodity service, where all but one company selling this commodity does so without any strange contract terms. Even if the chance that Gandi acts on their contractual rights is slim, there's no reason to give them that right in the first place. A company's brand, good will and years of backlinks are tied to their domain -- it's not something to put at risk lightly.

I deleted the copy of my comment, not a moderator, as it didn't need to be said twice. This does not "help me" in any way; I'm not affiliated with any registrar. The reasons one would point out an unusual contract term are pretty obvious -- most people don't read them, and this one's quite material to the decision of who to register a domain with.

So no examples, then? Sounds like FUD to me.

We call companies out on their ToS all the time, even if there's no provable harm that has happened in the past. If it's in the contract, they both intend to use it and have the legal right to use it. I'd rather not that that chance, personally.

I appreciate the strange terms being brought to my attention. I don't have time to worry about a company morally and subjectively policing the product I bought from them. The TOS is not a place to be clever and funny and this information has helped inform a decision for me. Just because you happen to not care doesn't mean other don't.

Surely it would be unwise to agree to an outlandish contractual item purely on the grounds that one hasn't seen it invoked yet.

And surely it is a good thing to bring it to the attention of people who aren't likely to read every word of a 20 page contract just to buy a domain name.

Don't pretend that Gandi is unique. Even if such specific language isn't in their legalese blob, Godaddy has arbitrarily yanked domains many times. And I'm betting that most low margin registrars would simply turn tail if threatened with expensive lawsuits.

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