TAOCase003 is about the economic abuse by GoDaddy against Mistress Eve with the unannounced deletion of her two websites and dragging the restoration out for over a month, impacting her ability to generate income to due the lack of visibility.
So far we had supported 2 sex worker in the US before that case who had their website deleted, 1 by GoDaddy, 1 by Wix and 2 other in cases of a potential computer/data breach (aka. hakking). The latter were easy.
The case of Mistress Eve from London vs. GoDaddy UK is worth writing about because what GoDaddy pulled in this case is showing the discrimination sex worker face in depth. The website was deleted on October 8th and by the time Mistress Eve turned to us, on November 6th, it got close to the last backup deletion cycle of 30 days.
As soon as we were on board we started working through the significant amount of emails GoDaddy sent just to find, that these were half truths at best, but mostly flat out lies.
After deleting her 2 websites, GoDaddy claimed that they would have difficulties to restore the websites due to the “complex configuration of the installation”. For each webhosting company getting a backup restored by a support employee is typically a matter of a handful of mouse clicks. In the email traffic we reviewed, GoDaddy admitted to be at fault for deleting the websites multiple times.
After they were pointed on that, they half heartedly restored one website but refused to restore the other still claiming the configuration would be too complex and asked Mistress Eve to hire a web designer to get the website back running. In short, to hire a web designer to do their job.
Increasing the pressure on GoDaddy, they did the next leap further into the realm of “never seen that before” by copying the complete backup dump into the rented web space, uncompressed and inaccessible, including the individual database files, occupying the entire quota Mistress Eve pays server rent for. This made the website neither manageable, nor maintainable as there was not even room for a single blog post.
GoDaddy claimed that their actions at no time were discrimination nor malicious but “a series of unfortunate events” and offered 250 GBP as a settlement. After a bit of further digging they increased to 500 GBP.
We pointed GoDaddy on the fact that they were in multiple violations of their webhosting contract:
- 98% website availability
- complete restore of a website within reasonable time (every court will confirm 30 days to be unreasonable)
- restoration of the most recent backups (the restored backup was from 2019)
- copying data into the customers webspace without consulting with the customer, thus occupying said space with own files
- continuous charging for a website that is not available
- not correctly restoring the websites leaving them not properly functioning
- The internet is full of reports of Sex Worker to whom GoDaddy pulled the same behavior, having to refund them up to GBP 10,000 after the ruling of a court of law.
It took telling them these points to increase the settlement offer to an amount of 1250 GBP. Compared to the loss of business opportunity this is still nothing, but it is the best achievable result without courts and lawyers..
Here is why what webhosting companies like Wix or GoDaddy pull is so malicious. If they would act the way the contract requires and they would like to get rid of sex worker, they could say “we don’t want to host you at the end of your billing cycle anymore”, or “at the end of this month and we are going to refund you the rest. amount you paid” and that would be perfectly legal, still discriminatory, but within the means of the contract. By simply deleting the website they violate their own contract terms, being very well aware, that in a court of law they would lose, but also being perfectly aware that sex worker have no lobby and hardly any qualified support in that matter.
The simple deletion of the website and after that refusal to restore the website is disrupting the business of the sex worker. Given that they are able to restore other websites within 48 hours leaves room for the speculation, that this disruption of business is the goal.
In normal cases court proof IT forensic work is about $120 per hour, this is beyond the means of any small business,, which normally leaves the webhosting customer with the option to try to grab the domain names and start a new somewhere else. For sex worker we offer this kind of service for free, if the conditions allow it.
This whole whole case is a text book example of the term “Economic Abuse”.