What the GoDaddy CEO said in many interviews and investor presentations is:
"Look, since we're not going out of business, and since the cost of serving
domain names is essentially the same whether we're serving a million of them
versus a hundred million of them, you should really treat this as a
cash-and-carry business. So all of the money that comes in this year is our
revenue, regardless of this massive balance sheet item that says deferred
revenue." What sophisticated investors looking at GoDaddy said was, "Well,
no. You do have to still keep running the business. And so from my
perspective, it looks like GoDaddy is incredibly levered. You've got so much
debt on the books. The debt isn't to a bank or to a private credit fund–it's
just to your customers. But oh goodness, is there a lot of debt. And since
that debt must get satisfied before US equity holders get the residual value
of the company, we are not willing to extend equity investment at the
valuation you think you're worth."
So, we pore over Supreme Court cases on the First Amendment, for example, to
try to interpret what tests we will use to determine whether something is
going to be unconstitutional law. Leoni didn't want that. He argued that--and
again, he was proud of the Roman law contribution. He said that the Roman
jurist was a sort of scientist: that the object of his research was a
solution to cases that citizens submitted to him for study. So, an
industrialist or a scientist might look to a physicist to engineer a
technical problem. So, private Roman law was something to be described or
discovered, not something to be enacted. So, over time, these principles
emerge.