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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Domain registrars have no business doing this. Originally, they just registered domains for ICANN. Now they act like they own them and just rent them out.

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Domain registrars are not obliged to give service to anybody. If you register a domain you are given the use of a nice-and-easy-to-remember alias for your IP address. Whether or not the registrar will want to do business with you is their problem, that's a transaction between consenting parties, not an obligation on the part of the supplier. Whether ICANN accepts a registration or not is another matter, and so far ICANN has not been involved here.

So stormfront is free to shop around until someone wants their business or they can use their IP address, assuming they'll find at least one party willing to host them.

This same argument could be made for gay couples who want service for their gay wedding. We already set the precedent that a business cannot refuse service for customers it finds objectionable. You are essentially arguing in favor of the christian bakery refusing the gay wedding cake. So I don't think you can have it both ways, you either force people to do business with those you find objectionable or you dont.

I agree. This is what society has come to.

Muslim employee in a supermarket refuses to handle bacon = okay

Christian employee in a supermarket refuses bake a cake for a homosexual = not okay

Free speech and anti-discrimination when it suits you, and the opposite when it suits you. The doublethink is strong.

You realize that you are equating Christians with homophobes here and there are a very large number of Christians that would strongly object to that.

Muslim employee in supermarket that refuses to handle bacon: fine, plenty of others to take their place, and it only affects that person.

Bigot in supermarket refusing to bake cake for homosexual: you serve the company customers at the whim of your employer, wear your bigotry for all to see and give the supermarket a bad name and you're in hot water.

See how easy it is to rephrase that and not have a conflict? The problem is that you chose to phrase your example in such a way that you could - narrowly - infer doublethink but all you really managed to do is expose yourself.

Discrimination based on sexual orientation is different from discrimination based on nazi affiliation.

Last time I checked, most of the stormfront members and most of the alt-right aren't committing any crimes against people who are coloured, just like how homosexuals don't commit crimes against heterosexual people.

Since you seem to have rejoined Hacker News just to post ideological flamebait, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

> We already set the precedent that a business cannot refuse service for customers it finds objectionable.

Incorrect; we've already established in law a small set of narrow protected bases of discrimination in public accommodation. Outside of those categories (or in business relationship that are not within the scope of public accommodation, regardless of basid) a business absolutely can refuse service to customers it finds objectionable.

Discrimination based on advocacy of race-based violence does not, it should be noted, fall into any of those protected categories.

>Discrimination based on advocacy of race-based violence does not, it should be noted, fall into any of those protected categories.

I agree but this policy is not applied evenly.

> a business absolutely can refuse service to customers it finds objectionable.

How was the gay wedding cake thing able to progress then?

> I agree but this policy is not applied evenly.

What policy?

> How was the gay wedding cake thing able to progress then?

In a large number of states, sexual preference is a prohibited axis of discrimination in public accommodations.

Oregon had a law explicitly restricting discrimination based on sexual orientation

LGBT people are a protected class, nazis are not.

Depends on the state in the US.

That's a real question in California. The Unruh Civil Rights Act has been held to be broad enough to cover white supremacist affiliation.[1] There are a few cities, including Washington, D.C., which specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of political affiliation.

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/1988-03-11/news/mn-1358_1_civil-...

That report is a trial court decision (with no precedential weight), and, in any case, the issue here (explicitly in GoDaddy's case, and likely also in Google's) is incitement of violence, not “white supremacist affiliation”.

I think you misunderstood the article.

Google didn't take away their domain. The domain is still owned by Daily Stormer. Google just refused to accept it to be transferred to them which is perfectly within the rules of ICANN.

> Domain registrars have no business doing this.

Why do you think that Google doesn't have the right (business) to do this? They are not the sole registrar. Is there some contract with ICAAN which specifies this as a duty owed?

> Originally, they just registered domains for ICANN. Now they act like they own them and just rent them out.

This is exactly backwards. Google is refusing to act like they own them. They're refusing to have anything to do with them.

> Is there some contract with ICAAN which specifies this as a duty owed?

There should be.

ICAAN should stop allowing Google to do any registrations. This is ridiculous.

Google does not operate the .com TLD. They only resell it.

Even though I strongly disagree with the content, I think it's an awful precedent.

Perhaps they should complain to ICANN (although I think the intellectual level there may be too low for a meaningful complaint) ?

Indeed, I know now that I will never own a domain via GoDaddy or Google. GoDaddy was already a known bad actor, but Google is an interesting one to add to that list.

Buy only from those who are willing to host controversial content - DynaDot has secured the wikileaks domain for years for example and gone to bat for them in court. That's the type of thing I want from a registrar. Those who don't protect their own customers are not worth a penny.

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