After long public criticism and in the wake of this weekend’s activities in Charlottesville, domain registrar GoDaddy has booted the hate site ‘Daily Stormer.’
GoDaddy, which is the largest internet domain-name seller in the world, announced Sunday evening it will no longer provide service to the neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer.
The company, which is based in Scottsdale, has drawn criticism for months for its willingness to provide a domain name for a website ”dedicated to spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The move comes after The Daily Stormer published an article Sunday using sexist and obscene language to demean Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman who was killed when a car driven by an alleged white supremacist mowed down a crowd of people after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va.
Granting that GoDaddy is a private business and that The Daily Stormer is as loathsome a site as one can imagine, the idea that domain registrars should have the right to control what content appears on the Internet strikes me as highly problematic. Ostensibly, this is about violation of terms of service. But, clearly, it’s really about the ideas espoused on the site and the fact that GoDaddy has come under fire for seeming to legitimate said ideas by hosting the domain.
Ostensibly, this is about violation of terms of service. But, clearly, it’s really about the ideas espoused on the site and the fact that GoDaddy has come under fire for seeming to legitimate said ideas by hosting the domain. Once the precedent is established, it would seem that any site that can generate enough public hostility would similarly be in danger, in that registrars who don’t pull permissions would be deemed de facto supporters. And, of course, other registrars are going to be exceedingly reluctant to take on a site that has come under such a campaign and banned by another registrar.
