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Comment by madhouse | Hacker News Reader

No, for multiple reasons:

* I never had problems with it.

* I registered my domains via google, I have no idea how to move to a different registrar, and I'm not motivated enough to find out.

* If I started to stop using services where I don't agree with either the company's decisions, or whatever their prominent staff members chose to do, I would have to stop using all such services, not only one. I would have to go offline and live in a cage, pretty much.

Just because I am using a service does not mean I agree with whatever choices the provider makes. As long as those decisions don't affect me, I honestly don't care, because doing otherwise leads to a path of constant anger and depression. Don't need that, thank you.

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In the words of Elie Wiesel, "Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor. Never the victim. Never the tormented." It obviously doesn't feel quite right to equate this whole fiasco to what Wiesel was talking about, but I just cannot think of a quote more fitting than that.

Too often people think inaction implies neutrality . It does not. It's an enabling behavior. Passivity is a free permission slip for the status quo to persist onward.

In the end you do have to pick and choose your battles. For me personally, this time I simply had to do it -- I transferred. It was a very clear choice for me, frankly I don't see why it isn't also a clear choice for you either (it's not that difficult to make the change, if you have the docs handy, etc.), but hey, whatever suits you.

It isn't a clear choice, because the service they provide is something I didn't have a problem with, and moving would mean extra work and effort I'm not willing to pay. Why am I not willing to pay the price?

Because, as I wrote, I'd have to do the same thing with every other company who's services I use, when I don't agree with their decisions, or find their CEO someone who should be locked away and never spoken of ever again.

If I'm starting to boycot companies based on what they support, then I will do it with all of them, not just a single one. However, that is not possible.

I'm not neutral, either. I'm not going to use GoDaddy for any more domains in the future (partly due to their support for SOPA, partly for other reasons). I just won't move my domains from there, because it's not worth the effort.

Not to argue about this particular decision so much, but in general the argument that you can't do X good thing because it's not possible for you to do the same in all similar contexts in your life simply doesn't hold water. It's your prerogative to draw the line for effort you'll allocate to this particular goal. Some decisions will fall below that line, and some above it.

It's basically saying you can't pick any of the cherries off of the tree, because some are on much higher branches than others.

That's fine; if you don't have the time to clamber around on a ladder -- e.g., research the ethics behind every company you give any money to -- you pick the low-hanging fruit. So when you can make a fairly low-cost choice to move away from a company with a history of dubious ethics that you already know of, you do it.

Or if you have an hour to spare, you can choose the single largest flexible expense in your life and improve your related decisions based on a little research.

There's always low-hanging fruit. If you want to make your life (and the world) a better place, that's where you start.

So you found solace in the notion that apathy is the exemplary path to happiness? I'm not religious, but I'll borrow a saying

Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I find it unfortunate that more and more people are not granted that proverbial wisdom.

While your view might be acceptable for some things, it's not acceptable when it comes to godaddy.

Their CEO is a bad person, they do a lot of bad things, they're exempt from SOPA, they support it, they helped redact it, they never withdrew SOPA support for real.

They threaten the 1st amendment of the US constitution - except it wil affect far more people than just the people of the US, the people for whom the US constitution was written for.

Please take these arguments somewhere else where they hold.

A lot of other companies were involved in writing SOPA, and even more support it still, that are not treated the same way GoDaddy is. There are a lot of other CEOs who did very bad things - but I don't see people boycotting them, either.

Just boycotting one SOPA supporter won't buy you anything, either.

Do tell me though, why GoDaddy is exceptional, and why the same treatment doesn't apply to the rest of the SOPA supporters.. because I honestly don't see the difference: they're all bad.

I didn't say anything about not doing the same to the others.

Please feel free to list up others along with what they did / are doing and I will support actions against all of those as well.

I only said the boycott against godaddy is OK for many reasons.

You can pretty easily get a list of SOPA supporters (eg, from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_that_supp...). Good luck boycotting them all!

However, I didn't say the boycott wasn't OK, either. It sure is, and it's well deserved.

I just said I'm not participating in it. If others do, that's their choice, and I don't see anything wrong with doing so, either. I just said I'm not going to, because (among other things) I consider it wrong to select one from the many, and punish only that, when there are others who are guilty of the same thing (and some even guilty of more).

I think the main factor here is that GoDaddy is probably the one SOPA supporter that many of us have used or are using. It's also very simple to switch away from them, and there are similar services with better interfaces.

Exactly, a lot of us uses Apple products after all.

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