alt Hacker Newspunitive seems like a huge stretch, damages sure.
Icann Arbitration seems like the wrong channel, those are typically used for when someone correctly technically registered the domain name, but there's a dispute from the non-owner, e.g:
1- Trademark holder registers trademark.com, malicious actor registers trademark-web.com and phishes. 2- trademark.com expires, and someone registers trademark.com and domainsquats.
This is not the case, all Icann can do is make decisions over who owns a domain. A civil court would be more appropriate for calculating and ordering compensatory damages.
Does Godaddy have a pattern of creating this sort of fuckup and then handling it in ways that uniformly favor Godaddy and deny customers contractual right to seek redress, that a judge might deem worth assigning punitive damages to warn other commodity-middleman businesses to not be like Godaddy?
Has Godaddy demonstrated a pattern of violating Godaddy’s contract with ICANN, whatever those terms may be, with regards to performance of the basic duties of a ‘registrar’ on behalf of domain owners?
I’m not evaluating these things today since I’m not their lawyer, but certainly they’re both valuable questions.