Gotta side with GoDaddy on this one. And listening to the recorded calls, I doubt I would have been that civil to the guy. Wow.

Siding with Godaddy too. I'm not sure a Registrar should be involved on this level (possibly but not sure about it yet) but regardless, the arguments made by the caller were very weak. What I'm really locked on to is, the caller blames the problem on a customer being the victim of a hacker and then it took a long time to reinstall things. If I were in nectartech's shoes I would have immediately killed routes to/from the affected box but they chose not to. They (nectartech.com) were in charge of the box sending out phishing messages and that could cause millions of dollars in damages to end users. Nectartech.com decided to NOT take the route of stopping the offending processes immediately and then panicked when they found out what would happen if they chose to ignore warnings. Godaddy was in control of the nameservers' existence in the roots but they may or may not have been in control of the actual offending domain. And even if they were, the messages could still go out due to inaction by nectartech. So nectartech.com chose to allow the continued sending of phishing scams rather than kill routes immediately and work it out later (as they begged Godaddy to do). The last piece is, Godaddy enforced what I think is a good policy which is, if someone becomes less and less reasonable on the phone, don't cave but rather, stick to your policies. It's never a good idea to reward bad behavior and what's funny is, you can get support folks to bend the rules sometimes if you kill them with kindness but you'll almost never get them to go out of their way if you are offensive.

Agree with everything you said. If I'm GoDaddy though, I think about having someone in the abuse department on pager to handle escalations like this 24/7; you can imagine a scenario in which you really need someone with authority from that department over the weekend. If I'm the hosting company, I think about paying more than $6 a year for my domain name registration if I want 24/7 service on everything. I might find another registrar (or, better, become my own registrar or reseller).