Let's be a bit less in a hurry to sling around accusations of astroturfing, OK?
Seriously people, this isn't medieval mob justice. We're not burning down a widow's home. Worst case scenario if we're wrong is a few stock tickers dip for a few days. Cut it out with this "omg mob justice" shit.
Good going, detective, now that you've outed me, I'll lose my job, and who will feed all of my 58 children?
Seriously, though, I have no connection with GoDaddy, I'm just very sceptical of the "GoDaddy will attempt to repair their reputation by actively making life harder for people who already don't like them" idea.
Sure, they may well be playing games to attempt to make it too hard for people to leave, but I think that it's much more likely that they have rate-limiters, and anti-spam/fraud protection working against mass migrations away from their service. If that's the case, I can't see them being in any particular hurry to fix the problem (or to even see it as a problem), but that's not the same thing as actively slowing down the process.
They have nothing really to gain by being malicious at this point, and plenty to lose (internet lynch mobs being easy to rile, as they are). Let's just put the pitchforks down for a little bit until we're certain that GoDaddy is really deliberately throwing spanners in the works.
Once you're certain of that, then by all means, go hog wild with your iNoose and your PitchFork 2.0. Until then, keep an eye on it, but let's not jump to stupid/hasty conclusions.
I'm not jumping to any conclusions. I could very easily see by way of whois lookups that 4/5 of my domains had their contact records REMOVED from the whois entry, and stuffed off in a supplemental url provided in the whois record, which required a captcha defeat in order to access. This simply doesn't follow the ICANN whois spec.
I'd say you're doing a lot more speculation than the people on this thread who have been impacted by GoDaddy's ongoing slimy behavior.