One of the more prominent domain stories to be discussed in the mainstream has been the game of hot potato being played with The Daily Stormer domain and website.
GoDaddy hosted the site and finally made the decision to tell the registrant to transfer their domain out.
Just hours after being dropped by GoDaddy, prominent white nationalist publication The Daily Stormer attempted to find a home at Google. As of press time, the site’s registration info pointed to domains.google.com, indicating the web giant had taken over services as registrar.
Shortly after the switch was noticed, Google announced plans to drop the site. “We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service,” the company said in a statement. Later in the day, Google also banned The Daily Stormer from YouTube, according to Bloomberg.
Google banning The Daily Stormer from YouTube seems like a big move, because there are a lot of YouTube channels that host content that most would find offensive. Google now in my opinion has to shut down a lot of channels that also provide what many would consider “hate” content.
There was a post on Namepros asking if members supported GoDaddy’s decision to request a transfer? While everyone is against the message of a neo nazi website, some wonder if GoDaddy is now on a slippery slope? Surprisingly more people do not support GoDaddy’s decision, in what so far is a very small sample.
Aaron Strong noted, “It’s amazing how many “hate” group domains I can find on GoDaddy using Google search.
“
Brad Mugford wrote, ”
So what happens if a domain is allowed to exist under Versign policy, but zero registrars are willing to allow it to be registered there?
The content is one thing, the domain itself exists independently.
It is easy to defend this decision when the content is morally repugnant to most people, but once again it is a subjective decision. What happens when this same standard starts being applied to other content people don’t like?”
I think in the current environment GoDaddy didn’t have a choice with this particular website. Registrars have a well worded TOS where they can effect whatever kind of change they would like with regards to a domain registration.
We did reach out to Goidaddy who sent TheDomains.com a comment:
“GoDaddy does not condone content that advocates expressions of hate, racism, bigotry. However, we generally do not take action on complaints that would constitute censorship of content and that represents the exercise of freedom of speech and expression on the Internet. While we detest the sentiment of such sites, we support a free and open Internet and, similar to the principles of free speech, that sometimes means allowing such tasteless, ignorant content.
In instances where a site goes beyond the mere exercise of these freedoms, however, and crosses over to promoting, encouraging, or otherwise engaging in violence against any person, we will take action.
Please know that we take all complaints about content on websites very seriously, and have a team dedicated to investigating each complaint we receive. As has been our position for over a decade, if at any time someone believes a website may be operating in violation of our terms of service, we ask that they visit https://supportcenter.godaddy.com/AbuseReport to submit a report.”
Now a slippery slope would come into play, if GoDaddy tried doing that to someone running a political website that did not espouse hate in anyway but went against their political beliefs at GoDaddy HQ. That’s where people wonder if it’s right, not about this website, but does it move to areas where they are not offended?
Let’s say the conservative ex Google employee that just got fired, if he had a blog, would they tell him to move his blog? Some worry it can turn into that once the egregious sites are gone.
I think registrars are going to see a flood of emails coming in, people are going to point out what they see as hateful or wrong and want to know why their website is allowed at their current registrar.
YouTube has a lot of work to do, there are several channels espousing hate from every perspective, they really need to get work.
excellent piece of writing. I agree registrars have opened pandora’s box.
Personally I would have preferred to see registrars (and Youtube too) taking a hard stand in support of free speech. And it is definitely hard to stand up for that principle when 1 of the consequences is hosting a neo-Nazi website. But free speech means nobody gets to censor ideas – no matter how wrong or how vile.
Thoughtful post, This is why I read thedomains, cheers.
Al Queda, ISIS, Taliban beheadings, tweets and recruitment propaganda, NO PROBLEM. White people lookin out for their culture. Hate Group. This is so fukced upp.
Agreed. This was staged to take away free speech rights from everyone Left of Stalin. Sergei Brin, Zuckerberg and company are intent on creating a politically correct speech prison.
Let me get this straight. Facebook and Google “staged” what precisely? Did they concoct a parade of Nazis and KKK members? Or did they push the gas pedal on the car? Maybe they brainwashed the public into thinking Nazism and murder are bad? Or tricked publicly traded companies into looking after their own reputation? I’m sure there’s a conspiracy in here somewhere, and they must be behind it. Maybe you can explain it more precisely for the benefit of a dimwit like me.
@Chris,
So in your opinion the KKK and neo-Nazis are NOT hate groups?
In that case, who ARE the hate groups?
i’d love to see donald trump call google and threaten to take google.com out of the root server if a single article accessible by google portrays him in a negative light. you either believe in freedom of speech or you don’t. google is EVIL!
It’s a fine line when the choice is made to block/remove something deemed unethical. If the same actions are not taken on other questionably unethical domains that get/got reported in retaliation and nothing is done about them, based on the same unethical values in play, it makes the governing of ethics come into question, which can be a ticking time-bomb.
Just for the record the domain name BlackLivesMatter(.)com is also registered at Godaddy
Are you equating that phrase with the Daily Stormer?
Both the extreme-right and the extreme-left are vile, and oftentimes violent. Nazi’s, the KKK, BLM, and Antifa represent the worst of humanity on different levels.
Trump was not placing the horrific atrocities that have been committed throughout history by both the Nazi’s and KKK on the same moral plane as the alt-left. He was, however, as it specifically relates to the events in Charlottesville this past weekend, correctly calling-out (for the first time by anyone in the White House, ever) the “alt-left” which include BLM and Antifa as being violent and organized groups of people looking to harm those who refuse to embrace their also-flawed worldviews.
Trump’s message yesterday was honest, fearless, and refreshing — and reminded me of why I voted for him.
#MAGA
From my perspective, saying “black lives matter” is a straightforward way of highlighting the injustice of disproportionate police brutality against black people.
It’s surreal that some people think that’s morally equivalent to carrying Nazi flags, torches, baseball bats, chanting Nazi slogans and “Jews will not replace us”.
My grandfather photographed the concentration camp of Mauthausen. I’m glad he’s not alive to smell the rot emanating from the country he fought for.
Yes, saying the words “black lives matter” is fine and protesting against police brutality is an honorable thing to do – if only it were so simple. The “BLM Movement” is a synthetic movement that was funded from its very inception, planned, and organized by globalist entities that are working towards an agenda that has nothing to do with furthering Civil Rights in America (by the way, this info is common knowledge and easy to verify – look it up). Many, if not most, of BLM protesters are paid to protest (which have at times turned into riots) — as a matter of fact, these organizers are so freaking lazy that they have been caught several times posting Craigslist ads to attract protesters.
Your moral equivalence argument is actually a straw-man argument, as I have heard absolutely nobody in government, the press, or in party leadership say that. Saying there were bad people on both sides in Charlottesville is a true statement.
You argue like a typical leftist-snowflake, in that you are short on facts and long on emotion. Grow up.
“funded from its very inception, planned, and organized by globalist entities”
Translation: It’s the Jews.
@John Berryhill,
What an odd and disappointing response. Religion and religious identity has nothing to do with globalists…they worship Power over all else.
My translation to your response: Deflect and spin in an effort sell anyone who will listen on why Trump is unfit for office.
@John,
The last time “STRIKER” and I had a chat, he said he’d buy dinner for any policeman who attacked the children of illegal immigrants. Some people are worth speaking with. STRIKER is beneath that level. Take my advice, and don’t waste any time on him.
@Joseph Peterson,
You lie. You are a liar. I have never, and would never say what you claim, you slanderous piece of filth.
Like most libtarded leftist snowflakes, you are all factless-bluster.
Go suck an egg.
@STRIKER,
Your comments are preserved at Archive.org. Useless to deny them. Your unedited quote:
“Interesting to me that ICE did this raid in one of the most libtarded cities in the U.S. (Seattle).
Do you think they black-bagged this “dreamer’s” head and whacked him a few times with the billy-club before throwing him like a sack of rotten potatoes into the back of the paddy-wagon? I wonder if he resisted?
Having President Trump and Attorney General Sessions in power makes me proud to be an American again, for the first time since Reagan was President.
#MAGA
If I happen to be eating at a restaurant and see any ICE agents eating there – their meal and drinks will be paid-for by me! These ICE folks are heroes and represent the best of American Exceptionalism.”
@John Peterson,
Your latest post proves your previous accusation to be untrue. And yes, ICE agents have incredibly difficult and dangerous jobs, and to buy these brave folks a meal would be my pleasure.
I had forgotten how dumb you are – thanks for reminding me.
Dinner … provided they “whacked him a few times with the billy-club before throwing him like a sack of rotten potatoes into the back of the paddy-wagon”.
@STRIKER, why weren’t you beating this kid with sticks yourself?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK3IeG5Dz5U
Couldn’t afford bus fare to join in?
Yeah…no. Tying unrelated posts together in an effort to “prove” your false accusation is the height of intellectual dishonesty. Typical.
Hey Joseph,
The snowflake beginning at 5:21 reminds me of you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox0LiRPrj2Q
No time to click. Where did all the other bigots go? There were 3 or 4 KKK enthusiasts in this thread when I first showed up. But I say “boo”, and they vanish like ghosts …
But when we use white lives matter or miss white america and similar thing thats wrong it all boils down to freedom of speech pal. When the fbi wanted records from google and fb thats what the ceos cried freedom of speech and privacy rights.companies like godaddy are as corrupt as can be .its funny how very very very hot domains that are dropping never get shown on closeouts someone is cherrypicking names to shield from view .please look at your drops and see
@Michael Berkens,
When did TheDomains become a hotbed for white nationalists? I’m not suggesting that you should delete their posts, as some my own were deleted last year. Let them talk. But why do they all converge on your domain blog?
@Ben Pedri,
So you “miss white america”, huh? Funny. I’m sitting at a table in America right now. 95% of the people around me are white. So what do you miss exactly? White social superiority? Racial purity? Segregation?
Hilarious that conspiracy theory bleeds into further conspiracies without even a segue! One sentence on the supposed extinction of white america. Then another sentence on the evil FBI. Then another sentence on how corrupt GoDaddy is!
Maybe it’s time to create a separate website called TheAryans.com.
They will never take down a domain on the left, no matter how hateful. I am upset by the anti-male bigotry of Wonder Woman when the narrator says men brought war into their world. They must know Margret Thatcher started the Falklands war on her own, she was in command and responsible. In the real world men and women support war under the right circumstances – so what does their bigoted slur mean?
The Communist Party USA is just as hateful as the Nazi’s. Communists are responsible for more deaths of innocent people than Nazi ever were. Why is there a CPUSA.org domain? We’re not talking about socialism or Bernie Sanders, this is a avowed Communist Party. What about a religious web site that objects to gay marriage? You never want anyone to express their opinion on that?
Hasn’t anyone learned that allowing the mob to silence people who disagree is not a wise choice.
I must have made a good point to reduce you to sputtering :.)
Both GoDaddy and Google have the right, as does anyone in business, to refuse to do business with anyone they choose, so long as that choice is not otherwise legally prohibited.
It doesn’t require any slippery slope, it doesn’t require them to be consistent, and it doesn’t require them to agree or disagree with someone else’s opinion about what is or is not offensive.
Either you agree that private businesses can run their shops as they see fit, or you don’t. As private businesses, GoDaddy and Google made the decision that they do not want to do business with this outfit. So what?
Of course there is a slippery slope for you to say otherwise is naive. I don’t want Nazi content anywhere on the Internet, but there needs to be consistency, don’t get me wrong I think most know Google is a leftist leaning, communist sympathizing company. They need to show some balance or be even greater exposed for the hypocrites they are but you are probably pro – Google so I understand your misguided opinion.
“but there needs to be consistency”
No there doesn’t. A private company can do business with whomever it would like to do business.
I don’t like eggplant. I usually don’t eat eggplant. There was one time that I had an eggplant parmigiana, and it was actually pretty good. I tried it again at another restaurant, and didn’t like it. Whether or not I want to eat eggplant is my choice, at any given time it is available. As an individual, I’m entitled to decide when or where I do or do not eat any particular vegetable. I don’t have to be consistent about it.
Google or GoDaddy can choose with whom they want to conduct business. They are private companies, and have that right. Now, sure, I understand there are people who do not believe in free enterprise or in the right of businesses to conduct their business as they see fit. These sorts of people include, ironically, communists.
Freedom is not a one way street. The freedom which permits persons holding any particular political belief to express that belief, is the same bundle of freedoms which allows Google, GoDaddy or any other company to do business with whomever they would like, or not to do business with anyone they may choose not to, provided it is not an unlawful reason. They don’t have to be consistent about it either.
Just for perspective, not all businesses have the right to refuse service. While the following example is a vertical to this topic and not related directly at all, it gives an idea of how some cases go against a businesses right to refuse service in the eyes of the law based on different variables: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-32791239
@Eric Lyon,
The UK doesn’t go nearly as far as the USA in granting unlimited free speech or freedom of the press. Over there, super-injunctions (basically gag orders that prevent a person from being named in a news story) are common. That’s not to say they don’t have liberty, but they don’t play by U.S. rules.
@Joseph Peterson,
I think I linked the wrong article, I meant to link the U.S. ruling on a bakery case like that. Here is the U.S. case I meant to link to http://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminated-against-gay-couple/
@Eric,
Yeah, I remember the case you’re alluding to. Personally, I don’t think the government should be in the business of forcing businesses to serve customers. If I ask a landlord in a conservative country like Egypt to rent a room to me and a woman I’m not married to, it’s the landlord’s right to refuse. If a landlord in the USA refuses to rent to an Egyptian tenant because he’s a muslim, I’d despise the landlord; but bigots will be bigots.
In the USA, this forced non-discrimination arose because of segregation in the South. Racism in that culture was so pervasive 50 years ago that it took the federal government to force white business owners to let black customers in. Fast forward, and now the same laws apply to wedding cakes. But the root cause historically – even for the cake story – is America’s long tradition of white supremacy. It took a battering ram to get that door open.
Granted, it’s a bit draconian for the government to force a business owner to decorate a cake. But countries each have their own diseased history. In Germany, it’s illegal to deny the holocaust. We don’t need that law in the USA. But Germany deserves and needs it. Our original sin in the USA was slavery, followed by segregation, followed by birtherism, etc. So the USA arguably needs laws preventing certain kinds of discrimination. Otherwise, if America doesn’t take its meds, we end up with 50,000 KKK members marching down D.C. like the own the place, as happened in the 1920s. Or Klansmen like Donald Trump’s father rioting in Queens.
“provided it is not an unlawful reason”… I think you missed that in what I wrote, Eric.
While it’s true, John, that companies are generally under no obligation to do business with any particular customer, I think this question becomes ethically awkward for certain kinds of large companies.
Large registrars and search engines usually serve the role of neutral facilitators for online publishing. They do their job well insofar as they’re transparent – not tinted to bias the spectrum of what can be hosted, published, found, watched, heard, read.
If every search engine and every registrar began kicking out certain kinds of customers, then where would these pariahs publish online? In the 21st century, free speech requires online publishing. It’s simply not enough to stand on the street corner talking into the wind.
Obviously, no company has any obligation to protect someone’s right to say or publish something they find objectionable. Only the government has that obligation. But in a non-legal sense, freedom of speech is a civic value that exists prior to and apart from any Bill of Rights or law. As a value, it’s very hard to maintain in the face of overt evil. But there’s an argument to made for accommodating even that for the sake of dissident expression in general.
@VR, it’s worth noting that having a liberal bias doesn’t make an entity communist-sympathizing. Just as Nazism is extreme alt-right, communism is extreme alt-left. While most of Silicon Valley has a left bias, they’re hardly on good terms with communism, and frequently clash with all the big communist nation-states. And despite their liberal social bias, they often conduct business in a more conservative manner.
I have quite a few friends in high-tech industries on both the left and right, including some who work at Google, and I’ve never known any of them to defend either communism or Nazism. Interestingly, my far-left friends were quick to say that Google shouldn’t be allowed to refuse to do business in this situation, while my more moderate and right-leaning friends felt that Google shouldn’t be regulated in that regard. While it does seem counter-intuitive that the left is defending the right here, it makes sense when you consider that the left is generally more pro-regulation. Perhaps if I had alt-left friends, they would’ve argued that it should be against the law for such a website to exist in the first place.
On an unrelated note, I find it fascinating that the website is now run by a Russian group, and Daily Stormer has been publishing content in both Russian and English on VK. The Tor hidden service is quite openly operated and sponsored by an unknown Russian entity. I’m not really sure what this means, but it’s interesting to see the alt-left (presumably) and the alt-right team up.
When are we going to retire this tired left / right dichotomy? It’s absurd to think we can arrange something as complex as political opinion on a 1-dimensional spectrum. One dimension will do for measuring the length of a broom handle. But it’s crazy to think that all the world’s opinions about economics, religion, military policy, the environment, taxation, healthcare, education, etc. can be somehow be lined up from tallest to shortest.
Russia isn’t the “alt-left”. They haven’t been communist for decades, though that’s presumably what you’re remembering when you say that Tor (being Russian-owned) is the opposite of the alt-right. Russia has gone from monarchy with the czars (extreme right?) to communism (extreme left?) to a pseudo-democratic dictatorship under Putin (extreme what?). The only continuity there is totalitarianism – an all-powerful regime at the top.
Tor providing cover for American neo-Nazi websites is no surprise. Russia has a lot of tech talent, and the country is run by a small but enormously powerful criminal syndicate. I personally love Russian culture and work alongside Russians every day. It’s no insult to say that some of the best cyber-criminals call Russia home. Domain theft often leads back to Russia. So does identity theft, illegal arms deals, etc. on the dark web.
Also, the Russian regime has a vested interest in supporting anyone who supports their man in the white house. Half a trillion bucks in that oil deal alone. Plus removal of sanctions allows the oligarchs to store their money safely outside Russia. They’re betting they can turn the anti-Russian party of Reagan into a pro-Russian party simply by fostering resentment of the “liberal elite” in the USA. And they’re right. It has worked. That assassin, Putin, is now very popular among Republicans. If Ronald Reagan were resurrected, he’d instantly die again of a heart attack to see his party turned inside out.
Preaching to the choir. I fully agree with every point you’ve made, but I was aiming for a more moderate, traditional argument.
@Paul Buonapane,
Yeah, I still use the “left” and “right” terms myself because these terms are the tools we’ve got – like it or not. Still, I wish society could find an alternative. Because when we’re stuck with simple opposites as vocabulary, we end up polarizing ourselves. Whenever somebody sees that I disagree with him about X, he immediately leaps to the conclusion that I’m a “libtartd” or a “leftist”. And from there he infers that I believe all sorts of other views that he hates. But logically, opinions aren’t bundled together like that.
I need to ask you Raymond, is there anyway to block people in comments like you can in a forum ? If I have to even see Peterson’s face, I am just going to throw my computer out the window. It was a good article that you wrote, but you should have known it would bring liberal rantings. And I hate the extreme right too before anyone gets nuts, I hate extremist views on any side.
@VR,
Sorry you can’t handle a conversation. Better to hang out with people who don’t challenge our prejudices. And if anyone shares an opinion we dislike, it’s time to go whining to Mommy or Daddy and ask them to censor your sibling. Right?
Not about handling a conversation, I simply don’t like you and places like namepros allow you to block people you don’t like.
@VR,
If you’re afraid of people you disagree with, then you should avoid public places.
This article was about censorship versus free speech. Personally, I value free speech enough that I asked TheDomains NOT to censor posts in this thread by white supremacists. And I criticized Google and GoDaddy for caving to public pressure when they suppressed a neo-Nazi site.
In contrast, you seem to think that censorship is preferable and have asked TheDomains to block or delete my remarks merely because you dislike me. The irony of asking for that, given what Raymond’s article is about, is really too delicious!
Word.