Massive boycott prompts GoDaddy to change its stance on SOPA bill

Andrew Kalies Dec 26, 2011 Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Us Geek Culture, Industry News, Internet, News

GoDaddy.com, the domain name provider that isn’t exactly looked very highly upon in the industry, is not having a good week. I’m assuming you’re familiar with SOPA, the anti-internet bill that has been making headlines lately. If you’re not, then you can freshen up by watching this guy’s video. It all really means that depending on the circumstances, the copyright holders can stop search engines from linking to those sites, or even worse, require internet service providers to block access to them completely. The bill also would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a felony. This has put GoDaddy in hot water due to their stance on the bill. 

Although most of the internet is openly opposing the bill, with good reason, there are still a good handful of companies that support it (including ABC, CBS, the NFL, and even Microsoft*). Up until very recently, GoDaddy was one of those companies supporting the bill. That is, until outraged customers threatened to migrate to a different provider.

Ben Huh (of I Can Has Cheezburger fame), threatened via Twitter that he would move over 1,000 of his domains off of GoDaddy unless they dropped support of the bill. His action prompted a huge boycott on Reddit, which in turn officially dedicated December 29th as “Leave GoDaddy Day”.  

To make matters worse for the domain provider, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales announced that the site would be moving it’s domain names away from GoDaddy because of their position on the bill.

Not even 24 hours after the boycott began, GoDaddy officially announced that they were withdrawing their support of the bill. Unfortunately for them, it was a little too late for some of their customers as Wikipedia stated afterwards that “Jimmy’s statement is still correct – we are looking at new providers”, continuing on to say that the foundation would be reviewing its hosting providers in 2012.

If you want to help stop SOPA, you can sign the petition or call your local representative here.
Although Microsoft has not openly said that they support the bill, they are part of the Business Software Alliance, which supports SOPA.