They don't use Godaddy directly. Godaddy is the registry for .us. Zoom's registrar is MarkMonitor, who appear to be at fault for this outage.
(I'm not affiliated with either, but happen to know the technical details of the outage)
I had Google Domains for years, until they abruptly and bizarrely abandoned it, then I left for Porkbun. Never had a problem with either of them. I get yearly auto-renewal notices. Everything works, and it’s very boring, which is precisely what I want from a registrar.
One of the really nice things about the service is they handle a lot of the general business continuity and security stuff that can really suck with traditional registrars. One of their main lines of work is they’ll work with you to resolve tld-squatting and typo-squatting by working directly with the registrars.
Even before an infinite number of vanity or scammy tlds started showing up it would be pretty difficult to find <your-growing-unicorn-startup>.biz to add to your portfolio of domains since the owner may just have forgotten to update their email in their registrar and were coasting on a 10 year registration. Maybe the squat was intentional and it’s now a 1:1 replica of your homepage with a phishing or other credit card scam going. Stuff like that really sucks to do yourself while handling your other responsibilities. MM was pretty successful at getting in touch with the owners in the first place and having the registrar yank and transfer in the latter case. YMMV of course.
Once a lot of tlds started showing up, and especially the porn related ones, they worked with the new registrars directly (like GoDaddy in the .us case here) in the “sunrise period” to make sure something like google.xxx doesn’t become a front page article about an actual porn site (in case you’re wondering, that one doesn’t go anywhere at all). Your other options are to work directly with each registrar or ICANN.
I found them surprisingly easy to deal with, and happy to have me on record that my toy domain had nothing to do with either their client or any money. I assumed as long as that remained the case I would never hear from them again, and for the decade or so longer I kept the domain, that was exactly how things went.
Oh, well. It's been a long time since I was so naïve as not to do a quick informal trademark/brand search before I register a new domain, so I don't really expect to hear from them again any time soon, either.
What services are they offering that makes them attractive to corporations?
Mark Monitor will apply a lot more filtering to complaints.
Ironically this is allegedly what happened in this case, a complaint about the domain got it taken offline.
It's like, as I'm sure I'm paraphrasing from something I read God alone knows how many years ago, if your publicist lets you walk into a press event with a giant blob of snot hanging out of your nose. There surely is a reason why that error occurred, and it probably is at least a pretty good reason. But no one is very surprised to see the intro invite from your new publicist.
It isn't a relationship you blow up on a whim, but Zoom that can't route call traffic is Zoom that's not generating revenue, and while the reputational impact is negligible if it happens once, it had really better happen only once. Zoom is the incumbent; no one remembers they were revolutionary once, now everyone only notices the parts they don't like. (Being a skilled but politically naïve sysadmin is much the same.)
Basically, this is why Ma Bell - which had about the only stronger possible "uptime" expectation, in that no one uses Zoom for 911 - was so uptight you couldn't even plug in a modem until about five minutes before divestiture, and specified everything down to the number of turns in the splices their technicians made. There was a fad among programmers, when I was a child, to consider such practices stodgy.
https://www.archdaily.com/973183/the-building-that-moved-how...
What a paragon of engineering.
What MarkMonitor can provide is things like facilitating RegistryLock, which makes it even harder for changes to be made. And account reps that know what's going on. I hate working with account reps, but if they're knowledgable and easy to work with, it's ok.
They do some trademark monitoring (thus the name), if you want to get your own related app taken down from Google Play :p (I'm not bitter, it was amusing). And presence services if you need to hold a domain in a weird location that wants a presence, they can probably arrange it, which is handy at times.
I'd love to know more details on this incident, MarkMonitor had a bulletproof reputation as a registrar that won't fuck up. Godaddy doesn't, but then I didn't realize they had taken over the contract for .us
(As opposed to a DNS server, including root servers - and even then DNS has provisions for downtime, not to mention redundancy in configurations)