Just a few days ago, GoDaddy lost a substantial part of its customer base, thanks to its support of SOPA. Nearly seventy four thousand domains were withdrawn from GoDaddy in five days. XDA forum joined the exodus list recently. Supporting SOPA has indeed proved to be bad for business (in case of GoDaddy). However, it is interesting to note that GoDaddy was supporting a bill that only made it guiltier in an ongoing case.

GoDaddy supported SOPA while fighting a court-case against the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). In this case, GoDaddy was sued for registering a few domains, which people used to promote the Oscar event. The proceedings of the case went to extreme levels requiring GoDaddy to explain its business practices, especially how it makes money with parked domains. GoDaddy founder and ex-CEO Bob Parson had a tough time facing 74,000 lost domains and a strong court case against it, which read as,

Suing under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, the Academy disputes more than a 100 domain names, including 2011oscars.com, academyawardz.com, jaylenososcars.com, betacademyawards.com, oscarsunplugged.com, oscarshotels.com, oscarstravel.com, oscarsliveblogging.com … etc. Damages could total as much as $10 million.

Clearly, GoDaddy knew that supporting SOPA was absolutely weakening its case. So why did it support the bill after all? Probably, it was hoping to waive the case off. However, it did not know that sharks are not to be befriended.