Godaddy lost 72,000 domains this week in protest of their support in SOPA.

Even for a mammoth like GD, the numbers are noticeable.
The problem is that people have short memories. Otherwise they would have dumped GD a long time ago.

Voting with your wallet can be effective against a corporation. But it's more difficult to do that when you're fighting against the government.

I have never like GoDaddy, all the domains I have there are the promo $1.99 or pushed from buying it from another domainer.
Moving all my remaining domains now, it's a good thing anyway before the price increase.

I wonder how many animal lovers completely forgot about Bob killing that elephant (or whatever it was) a few years ago. ppl were gonna stop using GoDaddy because of it. Gee, that turned out well.

Heh. If anything, this will last for give or take two weeks before Go Daddy's domain registration stats grow again.

Go Daddy might have to spend a little more for marketing, advertising or similar, though.

For one thing, SOPA is a threat to a domain owner's website security. You don't want to be operating your business inside an establishment who pledges allegiance to SOPA and vows to scan its customers like the Gestapo.

How can you sleep at night, thinking all your investment can be wiped out at an instant without prior notice or due process to you?

Evenif you know you are not breaking any laws, it's one thing to have a third party accusing you of IP violation and your provider keeps your website online "until proven guilty".

It's another thing to have your own website sponsor calling the shots and shutting you down and turning you over to the cops based on "guilty until you clear your name-- but we shut you down first until you do clear your name".

SOPA is more than just elephants now. SOPA is threathening the interest of customers of Godaddy. It's like doing your business inside a factory with armed guards pointing an AK-47 at your back ready to drop you if you make the wrong move.

And besides, i'm not sure whether Godaddy is King today because of some technological innovation or superior business model, that people cannot afford to jump to another domain registrar or hosting provider offering identical services.

according to this article http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/12/sopa-hearing-will-never-end.php

Not only GoDaddy support and help write SOPA, but they also exempt from it.

Polis pointed out that SOPA and Smith’s amendment already excluded certain operators of sub-domains, such as GoDaddy.com, from being subject to shutdowns under SOPA.

“If companies like GoDaddy.com are exempt, why aren’t non-commercial domain servers exempt?” Polis asked.

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Can someone tell me why SOPA is bad? If its about protecting piracy then what's up? Before the net all we can do was tape music off the radio on cassette. Now every movie is video taped and uploaded on the net the day it's released .
Of course people investing millions will have an issue. Millions are lost. I see people posting how bad the video quality is online. It was never ment to be online though.
We all have to be responsible how we use the net. If we are using it for a greater purpose to educate humanity then we have to govern it as if it is in real life such as shoplifting . We all are accountable for our actions. The net is not a space to lesson our responsibilities but a place to expand our horizons as individuals to do good .

gemstar said:

Can someone tell me why SOPA is bad? If its about protecting piracy then what's up?

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For most people the issue is not the intent but the language that is used in the Bill. Stopping copyright infringement is a decent goal but the language is rather vague and open to interpretation. Some sections have been interpreted to allow a violation of due process and other areas people argue will rock the core infrastructure of the internet. The lack of due process is a valid major concern.

For the most part reality is somewhere in between.

The Bill of Rights has just as many holes in it and it is held up as the most profoundly influential set of rights ever created. One needs only to look what happens when you get Supreme Court justices with a strict constitutionalist approach versus one with a more interpretative argument to see that.

So the intent of SOPA is reasonable - it just needs some tightening in the language. The reality is that the US Government still controls IANA contract and DNS and can probably do what they want anyway. As far as breaking in the Internet? It depends on what you consider broken - the Chinese government hasn't "broken" the internet.

Frankly I think people just like to get up in arms about things based on arbitrary advertising by the right groups exercising theories of influence. There's been far worse legislation that barely got a second glance.

The negative press is really just the culmination of a growing distrust of government. imho. That and people like to steal shit.

The negative press was on a slow news day (xmas day) let see if it keeps up.

Can someone tell me why SOPA is bad? If its about protecting piracy then what's up?

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The language in SOPA would allow entities to take action *without due process* not only to sites which are infringing on copyright, but on sites which link to them.

How can that harm innocent parties? One big loophole is UGC (User Generated Content).

Someone drops a link on your blog
Someone drops a link on your forum
Someone drops a link in their profile
Someone drops a link in a review
Someone posts copied/scraped content in any of the above.
You host web sites or blogs
You host any kind of content-sharing site (photos, videos, documents, powerpoint, spreadsheets ...)
You linked to a legitimate site way back when and the site changed ownership.
Someone maliciously accuses a competitor of copyright infringement,even if the claim is unfounded, hoping to damage their business.

Put that together with a "shoot first, ask questions later" bunch like Godaddy and you get the picture.

Furthermore, these companies can't be sued for wrongfully shutting down your site:

"SEC. 104. IMMUNITY FOR TAKING VOLUNTARY ACTION AGAINST SITES DEDICATED TO THEFT OF U.S. PROPERTY.
No cause of action shall lie in any Federal or State court or administrative agency against, no person may rely in any claim or cause of action against, and no liability for damages to any person shall be granted against, a service provider, payment network provider, Internet advertising service, advertiser, Internet search engine, domain name registry, or domain name registrar for taking any action described in section 102(c)(2), section 103(d)(2), or section 103(b) with respect to an Internet site, or otherwise voluntarily blocking access to or ending financial affiliation with an Internet site, in the reasonable belief that--
(1) the Internet site is a foreign infringing site or is an Internet site dedicated to theft of U.S. property; and
(2) the action is consistent with the entity's terms of service or other contractual rights."

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I'm not pro-piracy, but draconian measures like SOPA aren't the way to go. It stands to create a problem bigger than the one it's attempting to solve.

gemstar said:

Can someone tell me why SOPA is bad?

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Can someone tell me why we need another bill of law to reinforce existing laws ?

I mean, there are plenty of laws, tools, treaties and remedies available.
Ice didn't wait for Sopa to strike.

As usual politicians enact tons of pointless laws just to pretend there are doing something about 'it'.

gemstar said:

Can someone tell me why SOPA is bad?

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Here is why SOPA will be bad and Godaddy will be even worse.

http://david.weebly.com/1/post/2011/12/godaddy-a-glimpse-of-the-internet-under-sopa.html

http://seclists.org/nmap-hackers/2007/0

Your website could be suddenly taken down by some morons without any due legal process.

Great posts! Reps added.
Thanks:wave:

enlytend said:

How can that harm innocent parties? One big loophole is UGC (User Generated Content).

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But this is part of the problem. UGC consistently violates copyright/trademark laws and enforcement is hard/impossible (especially on foreign servers/foreign domains).

Youtube is the biggest infringer in the world. Google has methods to cut it down but they hide behind safe harbor laws in the US. Google consistently violates copyright laws behind "freedom of information". Freedom of information is not "free information".

Journalism is not cost free. Authorship deserves rewards in terms of ownership. The author can relinquish rights but most people don't respect those rights.

Seen advertising on NP for "article spinning" or "generated content".. yeah, most of it's technically stolen. Image rights? No one respects them (me included) and most of the time the rights were given away to the initial hosting site: Twitpic, Facebook, etc. UGC is part of a problem.

The question is in the term "innocent parties" - the USER is not innocent 99% of the time. The site hosting is usually protected by Safe Harbor.

Can you point to the Bill where it says I can get a site pulled without any form of court order and where that court order doesn't have a motion for relief by performing an action of removing said violating material?

The issue is that people take the SOPA and immediately expand it's use to the most heinous level of abuse possible and present that as a flaw. Take ANY law and you can do the same. Ever heard of someone labelled as a sex offender because they "mooned" someone? Gave their boyfriend a little fun when they were 18 and he was 16? (This is a true story - they got married, she's 30+ and still labelled a sex offender). Every law has abuse written into it. There are remedies. Same will be true for "victims" of a SOPA-like bill in the future.

SOPA needs OBVIOUS and SIMPLE cleanup and not to be rushed.. but there is a larger issue at stake that people don't look at because they're focused on this bill. Don't think that groups have an influence that way too. The existing status quo is very nice for a lot of businesses and political ideologies.

enlytend said:

I'm not pro-piracy, but draconian measures like SOPA aren't the way to go. It stands to create a problem bigger than the one it's attempting to solve.

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I agree with this; however, the problem is that to get a bill to successfully pass muster with lawyers, IP experts, is too hard. It will NEVER end review cycles.

The Right to Free Speech is in the first AMENDMENT and, in fact, opposition to the ratification of the Constitution was in part that the Constitution lacked adequate guarantees for civil liberties.

sdsinc said:

Can someone tell me why we need another bill of law to reinforce existing laws ?

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Existing laws are based on ECMA circa 1986 (I'm guessing). There hasn't been a comprehensive overhaul of the digital laws in a long time in the US (I'm guessing - IANAL). Not saying that SOPA is this but it's trying to fill a void, albeit badly.

The domain industry is totally unregulated and has failed to regulate itself. Some say the internet is about no regulation/lack of oversight. A lot of people if asked would be surprised by what rules and laws don't apply online...

sdsinc said:

I mean, there are plenty of laws, tools, treaties and remedies available.
Ice didn't wait for Sopa to strike.

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ICE didn't.. in part because the laws, treaties, tools and remedies need to be updated.

sdsinc said:

As usual politicians enact tons of pointless laws just to pretend there are doing something about 'it'.

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Politicians just aren't the right people to author bills. They're too influenced by big pockets...

People are the right people because they're too shortsighted.

Lawyers aren't the right people because an)l retentive doesn't go far enough.

Let's just move to anarchy. It will be easier in the long run

---------- Post added at 12:13 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:08 PM ----------

By the way. I like to argue for fun and non-profit.

enlytend said:

Furthermore, these companies can't be sued for wrongfully shutting down your site

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Id be interested to see if they can be now. Last time I checked GoDaddy could pretty much shut you down:

"Go Daddy may also cancel the registration of a domain name, after thirty (30) days, if that name is being used, as determined by Go Daddy in its sole discretion, in association with spam or morally objectionable activities."


But don't worry - Namecheap, Dynadot, Moniker,etc. etc. pretty much all say the say thing. Makes a mockery of the whole SOPA discussion imho.

Domainers - if they were *really* concerned would have their own private registrar.

According to webhosting.info, Godaddy is down 1 million domain names since November 14th 2011.

http://www.webhosting.info/registrars/reports/total_domains/GODADDY.COM

*

The truth of the matter: ANY registrar can shut you down (and ask questions later) if they feel that your site is up to nefarious activities.

Name and Namecheap seem to be all high and mighty in their attitude toward Godaddy, when, in fact, they will cover their own financial butts before they give their customers the benefit of the doubt.

And you can take that to the bank.



*

This is similar to the Anti-Child Porn law that was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Come to think of it, how could an anti-child porn law be bad?

Even the recent Arizona Immigration Law has been controversial, that even Obama is against it.

This is not to say we support child porn or illegal immigrants, if people are up in arms against these laws.

There must be a reason why people are against proposed laws like SOPA. And these people never said that they support piracy or theft of IP.

Go Daddy may also cancel the registration of a domain name, after thirty (30) days, if that name is being used, as determined by Go Daddy in its sole discretion, in association with spam or morally objectionable activities.

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Which begs the question: "morally objectionable" by what standards? We're all against "morally objectionable" things, right? But whose morals? It's language like that overreaching clause from Godaddy's agreement that makes SOPA so objectionable.

(It would take a huge stretch of anyone's imagination for any of my domains to meet that criteria, but that, in principle, is an example of why I don't keep domains at Godaddy. My primary registrar's terms and conditions are much more specific.)

Namecheap marketed sopa against godaddy, they opposed sopa and added a new coupon sopasucks which will make domain transfer for $7 + 1 year renewal + 1 year whois protection. what else needed, many godaddy domains are flowing to namecheap now. I'm also take this opportunity to move my exipiring domain names.
So Godaddy sucks & Namecheap gains....

lothos said:

According to webhosting.info, Godaddy is down 1 million domain names since November 14th 2011.

http://www.webhosting.info/registrars/reports/total_domains/GODADDY.COM

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Out of 37 million domains that could reach 3%, or maybe $10 million in lost revenue.

There already were good reasons for domainers to stay away from Godaddy. In the long run I won't have any domains there - all registrars have problems, but imo most have less serious ones than GD, and better prices.

Interesting this post:
http://betanews.com/2011/12/28/whos-dumping-go-daddy-to-protest-sopa/
Saying:
Why focus all that anger on Go Daddy, or any other SOPA supporter, when legislators in the House and Senate who proposed the Stop Online Piracy Act, and sibling PROTECT IP ACT (PIPA), have the power to pass a bill into law? Wouldn't boycotting them make more sense? Or letting President Obama know how you would feel about him signing rather than vetoing the legislation? We are entering a big election year in just a few days, after all.

Way I look at it?
Who really cares?

But surely godaddy is not sweating a few people going elsewhere.

They probably still registering domains at normal pace (hey, you all always get excited on the godaddy coupon thread!!!!).

And most of the domains moved out they probably either already replaced or will replace soon.

I would think that Domainers would be less affected by Godaddy's SOPA stance, compared to website operators on Godaddy hosting servers. After all, SOPA would have targetted what you publish on your domain, rather than the innocuous domain name itself.

interesting read, especially the link to the chrome extension

http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/29/n...an-stop-go-daddy-from-hemorrhaging-customers/

cheers

liquid