Anyone on X going down the rabbit hole of vitriol caused by a certain premature (?) decision by the NC team and its rationalisation by Richard K? Very unfortunate event that I’m not going to summarize or even link here. I'm not taking a moral stance, but some people (including a subset of our buyers) will probably boycott Namecheap and by the same token Spaceship "forever" (=for a while). It’s possible that this will turn out to be a polarizing event and some people will want to show their support for NC/SS/2CEOs, so the effects for us domain sellers on SellerHub and NC reg path will not be drastic, especially when the vast majority won't even know or care about these things.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention, just done the same.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2006732606164152651.html?utm_campaign=topunroll
I have long followed the
BDS boycott, which Israeli PACs have lobbied to have banned in many countries - and succeeded in many US states - precisely because of how globally effective it has been, and I also try my best to additionally boycott anything else that appears to prop up the Israeli occupation-genocide (as classified by all the big humanitarian NGOs, including the UN, Amnesty International, Oxfam and the Red Cross) of the last 80 years. Thankfully I never registered a single domain with Namecheap, but if I had I'd be transferring all my domains away as soon as possible because there's no amount of domain sales in the world that could make me happy with financing genocidaires and those who help scrub history for them - even Vollkswagen and IBM were forced to cooperate with the Nazis rather than volunteering to do so. This case is particularly ridiculous because it is literally an archive website whose links to evidence were being used by the Hague as evidence in its ongoing trial.
Any domainer who doesn't feel this conflicts with their morals should still think again about using Namecheap, because a registrar should be very rarely confiscating domains and deplatforming its customers, and if that registrar considers the simple documenting of an ongoing, legally-recognised genocide against its TOS, then there's really no other reason they couldn't suddenly confiscate domains as long as they give you 48 hours (!) of email notice. This seems to be backed up by their historical actions if you search the net:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506581. Ironically Namecheap has a very prominent pro-Ukraine stance, but it seems it's only Russian occupation (i.e. killing Europeans) they have a particular moral problem with.
For what it's worth, Richard Kirkendall's half-hearted defence of the decision - which it seems to be, from what I've seen of his normal responses - claims that it's standard policy to take down domains that host violent content, though I find it very hard to believe the second largest registrar in the world regularly takes down domains for this reason since we hear about it so rarely. For example, that if this were an Israeli website hosting videos of 10/7, they would have done the same thing knowing the blowback they would have gotten.
I'm now seriously considering moving my 200+ domains away from Spaceship before they next need to be renewed, and the only thing that's stopping me is that as companies Namecheap and Spaceship seem to be largely independent lately:
https://domaininvesting.com/richard-kirkendall-no-longer-namecheap-ceo/. Something tells me this recent decision has more to do with the new incoming CEO and his prominent role in the extremist Chabad organisation than it does Kirkendall, although it seems as the still active CEO he's taking the fall for it. I don't agree with the vocal minority of those in his tweets directing vitriol towards him, and personal attacks are unlikely to change anyone's mind, but like most progressive historical movements the pro-Palestinian movement is bound to attract naive and overzealous kids, even if they are on the right side of history. None of that changes the fact that Namecheap should never have pulled this stunt to begin with, and if Spaceship ever does, I'm definitely transferring everything over to Unstoppable Domains.
