An incident occurred a few weeks ago when GoDaddy chief executive Dr Bob Parsons posted a video of his elephant hunt in Zimbabwe where he  kills an elephant that was trampling local crops. For those that don’t know, GoDaddy is one of the largest domain providers in the world and also offers a bunch of other services (I guess this loosely makes this a Technology entry? I post it as General as well…) I was alerted to the “situation” when some of the people I follow on Twitter posted that they had transferred or extracted their domains from GoDaddy and gone elsewhere.

Another domain registration and hosting company put a sale on - bring your domain to us from GoDaddy and we’ll put a fixed amount from each domain transfer into the Save the Elephants. According to all reports, a large number of people have voted with their feet. The new domain provider and Save The Elephants have done okay out of the situation it seems.

Here’s my problem with all of this - how are people moving their domain somewhere else going to stop people from killing elephants? If you want to donate to Save The Elephants then please do so - the full amount of money you otherwise would have given to another domain provider will instead ALL GO to the cause. That stands a much better chance of being more impactful.

Another problem I have: if an employee of a company you do business with is doing something you disagree with, but the remaining hundreds or thousands of employees aren’t, is it fair to judge and/or attempt to punish the company as a whole for the actions of only one person? It’s fair to say that the CEO of a company holds a “special place” and it publicly visible but my experience with CEOs is that they are typically the least useful people in the company and are seldom ones who ever make a positive fiscal impact on the company or its bottom line.

It was a terrible thing to watch. I don’t agree with it. Then again, it’s not my backyard and it’s only one persons actions at play here. When the time comes and I decide if/how best to respond to this situation, I’ll try a bit harder to take the right stand. I would rather make a real impact rather than have a knee-jerk reaction that makes me feel slightly better on the inside in the short term but in the end makes no tangible lasting difference.