Monday 23 April 2012

Go Daddy Backing of SOPA, and resultant boycott



On December 22, 2011, a thread was started on the social news website Reddit discussing the identity of supporters of the US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which included  Go Daddy  Go Daddy  subsequently released additional statements supporting SOPA. A boycott and transfer of domains was proposed. This quickly spread across the Internet, gained support, and was followed by a proposed Boycott Go Daddy day on December 29, 2011.One strong supporter of this action was Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh, who threatened that the organization would remove over 1,000 domains from Go Daddy if they continued their support of SOPA. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales also announced that all Wikipedia domains would be moved away from Go Daddy as their position on SOPA was "unacceptable". After a brief campaign on Reddit, imgur owner Alan Schaaf transferred his domain from Go Daddy.
Go Daddy pulled its support for SOPA on December 23, releasing a statement saying "Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it." Later that day, CEO Warren Adelman couldn’t commit to changing Go Daddy's position on the record in Congress when asked, but said “I’ll take that back to our legislative guys, but I agree that’s an important step.” when pressed, he said “We’re going to step back and let others take leadership roles.” He felt that the public statement removing their support would be sufficient for now, though further steps would be considered. Further outrage was due to the fact that many Internet sites and domain registrars would be subject to shutdowns under SOPA, but GoDaddy is in a narrow class of exempted businesses that would have immunity, where many other other domain operators would not.
On December 25, 2011 (Christmas Day), Go Daddy lost a net 16,191 domains as a result of the boycott. However, on December 29th (the day of the proposed boycott),  Go Daddy  gained a net of 20,748 domains, twice as many as it lost that day.
On December 26, 2011, a Google bomb was started against  Go Daddy  to remove them from the #1 place on Google for the term "Domain Registration" in retaliation for supporting SOPA. This was then disseminated through Hacker News.
The rival domain name registrar NameCheap claimed that  Go Daddy  was in violation of ICANN rules by providing incomplete information in order to hinder the protest moves of domain names from Go Daddy to NameCheap, an accusation which Go Daddy denied, claiming that it was following its standard business practice to prevent WHOIS abuse.

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