This is bad.
Israel has something like this with "kosher" phones.[1] One man determines who the ultra-orthodox are allowed to call.
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-how-one-ultra-o...
Israel has something like this with "kosher" phones.[1] One man determines who the ultra-orthodox are allowed to call.
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-how-one-ultra-o...
Godaddy isn't by any means a monopoly. The barrier of entry into hosting DNS is trivial. I don't see the problem.
Not saying Godaddy is right or wrong here. Just that this is a slippery slope.
Maybe you meant the case where the company uses the exact same legal argument to later ban something you support? But this does not mean you must be a hypocrite, because the company might well employ it in error. Or you might have objected to already the first time it was stated because it was overly broad. Clearly hypocrisy does not follow automatically in the general case.
And this is no more a slippery slope than that which you stand on whenever you do any moral judgment. The real problem that godaddy's action calls attention to is rather the arbitrary selectivness by which companies enforce their terms of service.
When you rely on subjective standards, you risk very bad outcomes if you have a bad actor making those subjective judgements.
It's perfectly reasonable to have concerns over handing over the governance of online life to companies which are not democratically accountable, especially in an era of increasing consolidation in the technology space.
But what about AWS? Or data centers? What if banks and farms and electric companies start doing this? That's where this is going. Companies taking political or ideological approaches is becoming normalized, and if infrastructure follows suit, we are in serious trouble. Godaddy is uncomfortably close to this.
The private platform argument applies here as well. The payment providers can refuse to do business with anyone or any individual. Even for political or ideological reasons. Just look at the outrage [0].
The whole point is that, this can happen to anyone.
So one vocal minority with outsized power ("Texas right to life") is upset that an even smaller minority (a single hosting company!) is giving them the boot? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
And how is this a bad thing? This is the free market! Doesn't GoDaddy have the right to decide who they host?
This spills over into the larger community in strange ways. In Brooklyn, there is strong opposition to bike lanes through ultra-orthodox neighborhoods. Bike lanes encourage people to ride through in scandalous form-fitting outfits.
This is no different from Cloudflare shutting down 8ch or AWS deciding not to host you anymore. We’ve been saying for years that we’re over-centralizing our internet infrastructure and that just a few bad actors have outsized influence on what can remain hosted and what they want to pull the plug on. If anything, this is good because companies might finally wake up and realize self-hosting is in their own best interests.
Just look at what happened to youtube-dl. [0] The private platform argument applies here too, also defeating the decentralised purpose of Git. Had they self-hosted with their own GitLab instance, this wouldn't have happened.
Self-hosting was done years ago is the way to over-come this. Now anyone can get their website, business terminated by any of these companies by anyone who seems to not like your website. (Even if they try to bring it down themselves.)