Go Daddy No Longer Supports SOPA

> "Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future," Jones said.

Translation: we got caught this time, but will not hesitate to do it again.

Can we keep doing this, but for SOPA itself?

Until SOPA and its offsprings are dead, keep the pressure on GoDaddy and other supporters of SOPA! Don't let these weak public statements distract you; there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes.

Of course, I would have said that before they stopped supporting SOPA. They've always been a sleazy spammy company whose advertising is full of blatant sexism. We should not have been surprise by their support of SOPA. Sleaze will do as sleaze does.

Translation: Go Daddy removed all incriminating evidence of it's past.

There's no doubt they did it to stop the bleeding, but they still did it. And that's what we want right? For SOPA to lose traction, and for it not to pass. Yet it seems like this has almost become a dump on godaddy festival. Please don't lose sight of the reasons as to why we as rational internet using human beings did this in the first place.

Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but this reads to me like: we still support SOPA, but we're going to pretend we don't, because we realise our customers are against it, but feel we can fool them by making a pro forma denunciation of SOPA.

I'm not a customer of Go Daddy, but if I was I would still transfer my domains. This declaration isn't good enough for me.

One should resist the urge to say “yeah but they’re still awful people” unless one is willing to bring the same passion to everyone else on the list of supporters.

Again: correct outcome and for the right reasons.

"Go Daddy and its General Counsel, Christine Jones, have worked with federal lawmakers for months to help craft revisions to legislation first introduced some three years ago. "

Go Daddy wasn't simply _supporting_ SOPA - they were involved in creating it. They used their expert knowledge of DNS and DNS systems to create a system, which, I'm sure, would have provided them some competitive advantages.

If anything, this makes them even less trustworthy as an registrar than they were previously.

I'm a longtime Go Daddy customer and have several domains with them.

I've thought about moving from GoDaddy, but never made it a priority. But I finally got motivated enough to see the process of switching might not be as painful as I thought. Now that I've seen what else is out there, it's go time. As my domains expire in the next few months, I'll switch them over to Namecheap.

At least for me, it's too little, too late this time for Go Daddy.

Amazing discussions on Reddit and Hacker News - it'll be till Sept 2012 that this goes to vote again, let's make sure the SOPA discussion doesn't die during this time.

Nice job keeping the fire on this.

At this point, perhaps I'm biased and this is not the most productive response, by my personal opinion is still to "nuke 'em".

Far too little and way too late -- they were part of getting this monstrosity rolling, and their current action does little to stop it.

Put it in the entertainment industry's own lingo: The world needs an "example". And I think we'd have a hard time finding a better candidate (though there may be a some yet more deserving).

Thanks Wikipedia. (and I hope they continue the switch anyway)

http://twitter.com/#!/jimmy_wales/status/150287579642740736

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3387071

Action speaks louder than words. Let GoDaddy know they actually have to _do_ something that is in the interests of a free and open internet. Taking action that is harmful and then giving lip service to freedom and spewing platitudes is not enough. Let them know it:

Stephanie Bracken, PR Specialist 480.505.8800 ext.4451 PR@GoDaddy.com

If neither side strongly supports or opposes something but lobbyists strongly support it then expect it to pass John Doe.

The best way to stop SOPA would ironically be the democrats strongly coming out in support of the bill, which would make the house suddenly refuse to even vote on SOPA, and would cause the bill to be filibustered in the senate. Why, because republicans have to oppose anything Obama/democrats are for.

Republicans strongly supporting SOPA would also likely kill it. The house would pass it, and Reid would refuse to even bring it to a vote in the Senate, or would bring it to a vote knowing that it'll lose just to show republicans that it can't pass the senate.

If you doubt me then look at the payroll taxcut fight going on right now. Republicans always support tax cuts, except when Obama & democrats support it, like the payroll tax cut being discussed.

The pharmacy lobbyists know this as well, there was part of Obama's healthcare law (I forget what part) that big pharma wanted removed from the bill that a lot of democrats had opposed when the healthcare law was written. Big pharma lobbyists told Republicans not to go on a public rampage demonizing that provision and blaming it on Obama, republicans demonized it and Obama for signing it into law anyway, and dozens of democrats who had previously voiced opposition to the provision voted against repealing the provision when the House voted on it months ago, and Reid refused to even hold a vote on it.

So the moral of the story? If we want to kill SOPA we just need to convince one political party to strongly support SOPA. The other party will reflexively strongly oppose SOPA and block it from ever becoming law.

I wouldn't put it past them to support SOPA once enough people transfer back/keep their business with them.

I am, however, a little confused.

Wasn't the goal of the campaign against GoDaddy to convince them to no longer support SOPA? Isn't this a small victory? If people in the community are not going to support them no matter what they do, where is their incentive to change behavior? I understand the cynicism but we need to also reward companies doing the right thing, even if they took some wrong turns along the way.

[edit: formatting]

The blog posting emphasizes several times the importance and need to protect American businesses, which to me seems patriotic and sympathetic to promoting a good intention. I'm sure they didn't realize they would be "villanized" as a result of their actions.

Disclaimer: I don't support SOPA.

I still think people should stay away from GoDaddy. You should not do business with anyone whose first instinct is to support defective legislation when they so clearly should know better. GoDaddy have shown what their values are. It is going to take a lot more than a press release to convince me that they are deserving of my business in the future.

They already did the damage, and they've showed many, many, many times over that they do not deserve to have anyone's business.

The boycott should remain.

Let's see them invest some time and money into stopping SOPA. Making a statement is one thing, but money is speech these days and they can afford better lobbyists than we can.

The anti-SOPA movement is going to view this as a major win, which may distract from the bigger issue.

Sure, they don't overtly claim to support this law - but their actions after the fact shall really show whats going on inside.

Anyone recall when Earthlink was the only company to refuse to comply with allowing Carnivore boxes in its network?

Even though Earthlink, as a Scientologist founded provider, already had an internal policy of scanning all the traffic on their network to begin with.)

When the government shows up and wants something, very few companies refuse to comply. Even when they do not support the actions of the government.

We should be standing up to those companies as well - but we tend to forget quickly.

Nobody stood up to AT&T when they spied on EVERYONE for the crooks in DHS/NSA/CIA.

Doesn't that kind of imply that GoDaddy is less than concerned about the rights of domain owners? Guilty until proven innocent, I guess.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/strange-bedf...

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111115/09233216778/ron-pa...

PR matters a lot to companies, if general population shows this kind of activism, SOPA can be defeated. Good luck US, the rest of the world is waiting for you to nip this censorship in the bud before it spreads like the virus in Resident Evil movies.

Getting the public and Congress educated on the realities of information value is a painfully slow process. However, as the wave finally crests I think our grandchildren will look back on this and say "Wow, you all really thought some weird things." (of course they will likely think that anyway but still)

This company just reeks of clunkiness and tackiness. As keeps being mentioned, I can't believe tech-savvy, well-informed, well-educated people (e.g. YC founders) could go on godaddy.com, see their marketing material ("Go Daddy Girl (R)" ... what?!), their interface etc., and still go ahead and give them money.

May I suggest the next target? Comcast and the other cable providers. We should threaten to cancel our cable service unless they stop supporting SOPA. Obviously they will not do this, so we should actually cancel our cable subscriptions!

I'm glad Go-Daddy changed his mind. Now, this was just one battle, the war is not over! Let's stop when SOPA is no more, let's stop when we can decide what's best for all of us!

Go Daddy wouldn't be my first choice for who I want representing the internet to the government.

"While it’s nice that they changed their stance (publicly, at least), you’ve got to ask yourself: do you want to continue throwing money at a company blind enough to support SOPA in the first place?"

GoDaddy doesn't vote on legislation. I'm sending letters to my representatives right now pointing out the backlash and about face that GoDaddy has done.

It needs to be someone visible to whom we can send a very clear message, quite quickly.

Yeah right.

Maybe if we focusing on Congress.

Maybe if we stop focusing on SOPA supporters.

Maybe if we focus on the media industries that are pushing SOPA through.

Maybe if we boycott them and their entertainment products.

Maybe they will recoil, just like GoDaddy.

Maybe.

"Boycotts do not work."

If they do that, perhaps I'll consider staying with them.

Backing down from a position they had such strong convictions in only makes them look like more of a rat.

They have no honor and now they no longer have my business.

Just looking out for their bottom line, I'm sure.

This just shows what a couple thousand mobilized, highly motivated geeks can do in six hours. HN is solely responsible for this. Imagine if the top-ten stories for the day on this board were about the conditions at Apple's factories in China. Or the massacres going on in Syria, for that matter. Something more important than whether that elephant-murdering bastard is a 99%, or a 100% asshole.

But, credit where it's due, this isn't the first time I've noticed a shift in public perception within 24-48 hours of a major HN freakout. I won't say how much money I've made buying or selling based on watching this phenomenon -- not a ton -- but it's recently been more than I make at my day job. It's a shame Godaddy's not publicly traded, or we could've all had some fun with it.

This is the place where the people who man the engines spend their time. And when the engineers are pissed, shit breaks. Never mind that engineers are just as often wrong as everybody else, just think of HN articles as events that bubble, and figure out if they're going to be ignored or not by the larger program.