GO DADDY SOLD TO KKR AND SILVER LAKE

The Go Daddy Group, the controversial giant of Internet address registration companies, said Friday that it would sell itself to a group led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Silver Lake.

While the company did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, the buyers are paying about $2.25 billion, according to people briefed on the matter.

In Go Daddy, the investor group — which also includes Technology Crossover Ventures as a minority partner — will buy the biggest domain name registrar in the world. The company manages more than 48 million domain names and has nearly 9.4 million customers.

When Go Daddy sought to go public in 2006, the company reported $139.8 million in revenue and conceded that it had consecutive annual losses. Since then, however, it has built up its business significantly: It reported $1.1 billion in sales for its most recent fiscal year.

RUMOR: APPLE'S CLOUD SERVICE TO BE NAMED......iCLOUD

According to the latest Internet rumor, Apple’s presumed cloud-based service may be getting a familiar moniker. Blog GigaOM is reporting that the Cupertino company has purchased the domain name iCloud.com from Swedish company Xcerion. We wouldn’t be surprised if the rumor turned out to be true, Apple has had a love affair with the vowel “i” since the early 1990′s, although, as TechCrunch points out, the iPad was thought to be called the iSlate at one point. The report states that Apple paid $4.5 million for the domain name, and states that Xcerion recently re-branded its service’s name from iCloud to CloudMe.

WIKILEAKS MOVES TO SWITZERLAND; CHANGES DOMAIN NAME

After being ousted by Amazon’s Web Services, the controversial site WikiLeaks has run into another snafu, this time with its DNS provider, EveryDns.net. Via a statement, EveryDns stated that due to “interference issues” that are affecting the service of others, the company has ceased resolving wikileaks.org; the service was provided to WikiLeaks for free. In response to the DNS shutdown, WikiLeaks tweeted the following message:

WIKILEAKS: Free speech has a number: http://88.80.13.160

In a subsequent tweet, the company then announced that it had moved to Switzerland; the site’s new domain name is now wikileaks.ch.

A very vocal opponent of the WikiLeaks cable publishings has been the Independent Senator from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman. The Senator has introduced legislation, dubbed the SHIELD (Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination) Act, that would make it illegal to publish information “concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government” or information relating to “a classified source or informant.” We have to wonder where Sen. Lieberman’s legislation was when CIA operative Valerie Plame was outed. No word on when the new legislation will hit the Senate floor.

Meanwhile, Amazon has released a statement stating that the reason for its removal of WikiLeaks’ data from its AWS servers was not a result of denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks or government pressure, but rather the fact that the site did not operate within Amazon’s terms of service. [BGR]