Nepotism Barbie is trending on Twitter right now, and the domain name NepotismBarbie.com was registered at GoDaddy in January of this year. It doesn’t look like the registrant has done anything with this domain name, but that is not really the point of this article.

Have a look at NepotismBarbie.com, a domain name that resolves to the default GoDaddy nameservers. This looks like the standard GoDaddy default landing page. Here’s a screenshot of what you would see if you were on your desktop computer and typed in NepotismBarbie.com:

Some unfortunate news to report from GoDaddy this morning. GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani had the difficult job of announcing a round of layoffs at the company, the direct result of the impact the COVID-19 coronavirus has had on the company. The news comes less than three months after the company “pledged not to lay off employees for at least 90 days,” according to a Phoenix Business Journal article from April.

Want to buy a domain name that is registered at GoDaddy? Getting in touch with a registrant via email or phone just became a bit more difficult. As of yesterday, GoDaddy is no longer showing domain registrant contact information in Whois records. The only information that is shown on Whois searches is the registrant organization, registrant state and country, and nameserver records. Email addresses and phone numbers are no longer shown.

While this change is going to be frustrating to domain investors, journalists, and possibly law enforcement personnel, it is not unexpected. In April, I reported that GoDaddy planned to remove public Whois records across the board, as it has been doing to customers in Europe whose data was redacted due to GDPR privacy laws. The impetus for this most recent change was the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Here’s how a Whois lookup at GoDaddy appears today for domain names that are not registered under privacy proxy: