Wow that was quick.
One day after a post on Reddit called for a boycott of Godaddy.com due to its support of the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA), Godaddy.com just issued a statement saying it no longer supports it.
“””Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” currently working its way through U.S. Congress.
“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation — but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”
“Go Daddy and its General Counsel, Christine Jones, have worked with federal lawmakers for months to help craft revisions to legislation first introduced some three years ago. Jones has fought to express the concerns of the entire Internet community and to improve the bill by proposing changes to key defined terms, limitations on DNS filtering to ensure the integrity of the Internet, more significant consequences for frivolous claims, and specific provisions to protect free speech.””
“As a company that is all about innovation, with our own technology and in support of our customers, Go Daddy is rooted in the idea of First Amendment Rights and believes 100 percent that the Internet is a key engine for our new economy,” said Adelman.
“”In changing its position, Go Daddy remains steadfast in its promise to support security and stability of the Internet. In an effort to eliminate any confusion about its reversal on SOPA though, Jones has removed blog postings that had outlined areas of the bill Go Daddy did support.””
“Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future,” Jones said.””
Its quite a change from yesterday where Godaddy said they weren’t worried about the boycott or the proposed Move Your Domain Away From Godaddy.com called for December 29th.
The boycott went viral yesterday and Thedomains.com, post which carried Godaddy.com statement in support of the Bill which was cited by the author of the Reditt.com post, got well over 35,000 visitors yesterday and over 15,000 today.
Hi,
LOL
Me Thinks…
“A Month Plus Short ~ A Now More Than A Penny Short” 😉
‘D’
“Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future,” Jones said.””
Right! Thats why they ran a website selling names they had scooped from their clients and
thats why they ran auctions in which their own employees were allowed to bid and win, and thats why they deleted names from peoples accounts without due process.
Liars, cheats and thieves. Its too late Daddy, the damage is done.
A Quote from From yesterday’s Money.com:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/22/technology/sopa_vote/index.htm?iid=SF_BN_River
“A congressional vote on an anti-piracy bill that Internet heavyweights like Google say would be an online Armageddon has been delayed until 2012.”
I guess GoDaddy still wants to be considered a technology/ internet heavyweight like Google ::))
You can see Parsons no longer in charge. Wishy Washy is in.
LOL@Godaddy. Mindboggling.
I predict the next two Godaddy press releases will be…
1) Ponies are evil incarnations spawned from the depths of hell.
2) No wait, ponies are cute and cuddly so you should buy a domain from us.
Once again, screw ’em.
Too late.
Too little, too late, methinks!
Hi,
Now they can show some ‘Real Balls’ and put their MONEY where their ‘New Mouth’ is at…
Instead of promoting/pumping “.CO” in their Super Bowl ad(s) this year…they can come out with an “Anti-SOPA” ad…promoting the freedom of the Internet from Hollywood, The Music Industry, Lawyers & Government.
‘Anti SOPA GIRL’….would be Smoking HOT 😉
‘D’
Dan
Godaddy said they were dropping their support of the bill, I didn’t see where they said they were opposing it
Perhaps now the ICANN Board will learn from GoDaddy’s reversal, and drop their support for new TLDs.
@ George
+1
….and also drop their support and/or enabling of Verisign’s monoplistc, overly aggresive & unwarranted domain pricing practices
George
Bad comparison, ICANN doesn’t have customers to answer ot
uhh… didn’t the BloDaddy lawyer already testify to Congress in support of this bill?
That’s kind of like un-ringing a bell, isn’t it?
Mike–Thanks for keeping the spotlight on SOPA (HR 3261) and PIPA (S 968), which both present multiple threats to the Internet, innovators, domain registrants, and domain name industry intermediaries.
On December 7 the Internet Commerce Association sent a long and detailed letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairmam Lamar Smith and other key Committee members expressing ICA’s opposiion to the legislation because “we believe that SOPA may have an unintended but nonetheless devastating impact upon domain name registrars and other intermediary companies that participate in the domain name industry, and may also impose excessively burdensome and intrusive registrant monitoring responsibilities that will result in substantial cost increases in the pricing of domain name registrations and renewals as well as many other domain-related services. In addition, the collateral impact upon the domain registrants that our industry serves may be severe in many cases, resulting in extreme disruption of the Internet-based economy.” That letter can be found at http://internetcommerce.org/SOPA%20Concerns ; note that the last footnote specifically discusses how Go Daddy might fare under the legislation. We shared that letter with Go Daddy and hope that it played some part in their reversal on SOPA, although the bulk of the credit clearly goes to the many domain registrants who have weighed in over the past few days.
We welcome Go Daddy’s change of heart on SOPA, and hope that they will take the next logical step and also come out in opposition to the analagous Senate bill, PIPA (S. 968). Just before Congress adjourned for the year Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that PIPA would be brought up as the first order of business when the Senate reconvenes on January 24th. AS THINGS NOW STAND, PIPA IS A MORE DANGEROUS BILL THAN SOPA. The substitute version of SOPA that is being marked up in House Judiciary now restricts the private right of action and legal immunization of “voluntary” service terminations solely to foreign websites — it’s still a bad bill, but almost all domestic websites, including .com and .net domains, are exempt. PIPA, on the other hand still has its corresponding sections applicable to all domestic and foreign websites — and, if Hollywood gets its way, any final bill worked out between the House and Senate will likely have the same broad coverage. That’s why these bills have to be stopped cold in their tracks.
THE ICA WILL CONTINUE TO OPPOSE SOPA AND PIPA, AND TO SUPPORT THE FAR MORE TARGETED OPEN LEGISLATION BACKED BY SEN. WYDEN, REP. ISSA, AND OTHER CONGRESSIONAL CHAMPIONS OF AN OPEN INTERNET. Information about OPEN can be found at http://keepthewebopen.com/ .
Let’s all work to keep the Internet free for innovation in 2012!
Best, Philip
Phil
Thanks to you for keeping on top of this issue for all domain holders benefit.
I think its important to make two notes here, while Godaddy withdrawal of support for the Bill is great, the Bill continues on in January.
And while Godaddy pulled it support from it, its also clearly did not indicate it was opposing it, which is quite different and which TechCrunch also pointed out.
techcrunch.com/2011/12/23/godaddy-ceo-there-has-to-be-consensus-about-the-leadership-of-the-internet-community/
See what you did, @ MHB? Nice going! 😀
@Michael
Very good point. I guess I got way out in front of myself 😉
Their position now may be as bad for them as supporting the bill back in NOV.
The ‘PR’ nightmare continues.
It is now clear to me that they do support the bill in one form or another. So, the ‘PR’ today just compounds the problem of their position(s)…IMO
At least the domain world in general and domain name registrars specifically, now have a chance to ‘engage’ on these so very important issues, before mid-January…after being almost deafly silent on this for months on end.
___
@ Philip ~ Spot on as usual!
___
How about any of them coming right out and saying no new bill(s) on this at all?
Already more than enough Laws on the books for these Self Interest Groups lobbying to pass these bills. ( SOPA & Protect IP Act)
Like:
Pro-IP Of 2008
LANHAM ACT
DMCA Safe Harbors
And more…
__
Merry Christmas To All
‘D’
@ MHB
…..and ICANN often appears that they don’t really want to answer to Anybody about their way & means…. relatedly, they have often refused to directly answer… and/or deflect many worthy questions posed to them at ICANN meeting… Nuff said
Fascinating.
Some people still maintain that “boycotts” do not work.
Well, bad PR seems to work.
It is indeed too late for GoDaddy.
What they say and what they do are not the same. Integrity failure.
@GeorgeK: It’s true that ICANN doesn’t have paying customers. But they do have _users_. That includes developers who hard code the IP numbers for ICANN root servers in their root.hints file and end-user of software that allows the user to select their own root.hints file and hence their own choice of root servers.
And in that respect a boycott or bad PR serves the same purpose.
Who is going to choose to use GoDaddy as a registrar now?
If we learn a domain name is registered through GoDaddy, or that a website is hosted on GoDaddy, what will we think about that website?
Well, I suppose GD “going neutral” is at least something.
Better of course if they’d actually oppose it.
Too bad they can’t bring back that elephant Bob murdered.
GoDaddy CSR is begging people to stop transferring domains. They should’ve thought about all the consequences before supporting SOPA and posting the blog post with comments disabled.
If anything, Go Daddy knows they can’t and won’t stop people from leaving if they want to. Next best thing is to lessen the damage.
If their elephant-shooting fiasco will be any indication, Go Daddy will recover in the long run. I once blogged their stats (not necessarily accurate) went down for roughly two weeks, then restored and even grew after that.
Uzoma
There are other blog aggregators out there including namebee.com and
domainsville.com
Obviously your comment has nothing to do with the topic posted here and the same repeated on another post so its seems like spam and therefore was deleted from both post
Hi,
Interesting….
“Boycott GoDaddy until they send a letter to Congress taking back any and all support of the House and Senate versions of the internet censorship bill, both SOPA and PIPA. Since the announcement of the boycott of GoDaddy, GoDaddy has just publicly dropped their support of the heinous Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA. But, they still support the Senate version of SOPA, called PIPA or PROTECT-IP. If you work on the internet and do business with GoDaddy you’re supporting a company who is actively working against your best interests.”
http://godaddyboycott.org/
‘D’
Go Daddy reversed course only because they realize their position is bad for business. Go Daddy isn’t *against* SOPA now, it just isn’t for nor against it. I do believe that a boycott is in order. SOPA will be harmful if passed into law. Go Daddy’s position shows they are no friend of the internet. I moved my domains and hosting out of Go Daddy years ago because the quality of service was poor. If I was still there, you better believe I would transfer my stuff out because of this.
Like I said elsewhere, amazing what a mountain of venture capital and outside investors will do to a company. My guess this same mountain of money has probably saved the lives of some elephants too. Maybe we should feel sorry for the villagers though?
too late , more than 7300 domains lost , that is the result of poor mind .
If Reddit went up for auction 10 years ago it wouldn’t have got even a $200 bid. Rethink traffic/ domains
I think congress and the senate should ask Harry and Nancy to ask there body at the white house if they should get in touch with Solyndria and MF Global and the new solyndez that is going to be make our milatary buy $16.00 a gallon fuel instead of $4.00 a gallon fuel from you know who’s nontaxpayers body to maybe subsidize this and then everyone could go bankrupt and then try to find the money, that should be a new reality show called find the money not fund the money, then the first amendment might still mean something ,some would say leave if you don’t like it but Iam not the one who should be leaving and if godad doesn’t do the right thing so it is out in the open I do not think I will be the only one calling my congressman and my senator or maybe I could just let them know how I feel on there website!!!!!!!!
@billkandravi: New Years Eve ended two days ago.