Last month I showed you how to change nameservers, using GoDaddy as an example. Well I’m going to talk about GoDaddy again but for a different reason. In October 2011 Congressman Lamar Smith introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which is a bill that would make it quite easy to get court orders to shut down any website suspected of participating in copyright infringement in any way, even indirectly.
GoDaddy was, until recently, pro-SOPA but quickly pulled support after receiving hundreds of boycott threats. Most Internet companies including Google, Facebook and Yahoo! are against the bill which is considered by Google’s Eric Schmidt as ‘Censorship’ and ‘Draconian’. In short, the bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice and the copyright holders to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. For the Stanford Law Review, the bill is ‘Unconstitutional’ and ‘Would break the Internet’.
GoDaddy being one of the companies that helped craft the bill’s current wording, many have threatened to move their domain names off GoDaddy, including big names like I Can Has Cheeseburger’s Ben Huh who has over 1,000 registered on GoDaddy. Many others have threatened to transfer their domain names on December 29th, 2011. GoDaddy pulled support for SOPA but still supports the Protect IP Act (PIPA), which is a related bill, and also publicly announced that they will consider supporting future versions of SOPA… which is why the boycott call stands.
More recently it has been reported that GoDaddy has become slow in transferring domain names to other registrars, and has even been accused by NameCheap of hindering the domain transfer process, by returning incomplete WhoIs information, which is against ICANN rules. Several reports claim that about 70,000 domain names have been transferred from GoDaddy to other domain name registrars since last week, and this only the beginning…
I personally am against SOPA as I consider this bill as being a step towards a censored Internet, which is clearly not what I want for our and future generations. This bill will also have a negative impact on thousands Internet businesses, and not just the big ones (which will be able to afford lawyers) but small ones as well which might not make it through. If the bill passes, even social network users could be held liable if any copyrighted material is distributed on their pages, by themselves or a third party.
Whether you think I’m right or wrong, feel free to leave a comment below! If you want to learn more about SOPA and the GoDaddy boycott, I suggest that you read the following articles:
Suggested Readings:
- Don’t Break The Internet (Stanford Law Review)
- How SOPA Would Affect You (CNet)
- GoDaddy Sucks (Colin Klinkert)
