Goddady Tries To Recover After SOPA PR Nightmare

If you are living in the United States, you should have heard about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect-IP, which, when passed, would give companies rights that they should not have. If it passes, IP rightsholders (a term vaguely defined) could send notices to payment processors or ad services like Google Adsense to force them to stop doing business with listed websites, all without legal process.

Site owners have five days to file a counter-notice, but neither payment processors or ad networks have any obligation to respect it. Even worse, they are granted "immunity for choking off a site if they have a “reasonable belief” that some portion of the site enables infringement".

I suggest you check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation, this post by Mythbuster Adam Savage and this nice infographic for additional information about SOPA.

The Internet can be a mighty weapon; the latest company to find out about this is GoDaddy, who support SOPA and Protect-IP.

A Reddit user suggested to move away domain names and hosting from GoDaddy to other providers to boycott the company for their pro SOPA stance. This got the ball rolling with regular users and companies moving domains away from GoDaddy at a rapid pace. It is not clear how many webmasters and companies have moved domain names and hosting from GoDaddy to other companies, but it is likely that the value is in the tens of thousands already.

Other hosting companies sized the opportunity with special offers for GoDaddy customers who move their domains and hosting (see blog posts on Name, Hostgator or Easy DNS for example.

Godaddy released a press release a day later, stating that the company "is no longer supported SOPA", and that "Go Daddy will support it [again] when and if the Internet community supports it".

And while it is nice to see that GoDaddy has changed their stance on SOPA, you'd still want to ask yourself if you want to continue working with a company who supported the bill in the first place.

You may also be interested in a list of companies and organizations who openly support SOPA. You find the list here.

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