As I was writing a story about some customers lining up to boycott GoDaddy.com, I stumbled across another story about the company dropping its support of the antic-piracy bill.
The company said in a statement on its web site that it is "no longer supporting SOPA, the 'Stop Online Piracy Act' currently working its way through U.S. Congress."
"Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation - but we can clearly do better," Warren Adelman, Go Daddy's newly appointed CEO, said. "It's very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."
The company added that, in changing its position it remains committed to its "promise to support security and stability of the Internet." The company also said that it removed "blog postings that had outlined areas of the bill Go Daddy did support" to avoid confusion.
"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.
Clearly threats of boycotts helped GoDaddy change its mind quickly. The biggest threat came from Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger. In a Twitter message last night he said:
"We will move our 1,000 domains off @godaddy unless you drop support of SOPA. We love you guys, but #SOPA-is-cancer to the Free Web".
GoDaddy.com was also targeted by a new web site that popped up at http://godaddyboycott.org. As the name implies, the site was collecting signatures and asking visitors to boycott the company. They even offered some alternatives to GoDaddy:
"Several other domain registration services have publicly proclaimed their opposition to SOPA: Hover, NameCheap and Dreamhost, and Name.com to name a few. Many will even give you a special discount if you're switching from GoDaddy. Lifehacker has a good list of alternatives and some instructions."
The page asked visitors to leave their email address, name, zip code, and the number of domains they plan on dropping.
Comments
Re: GoDaddy Drops SOPA Support
This feels like too little, too late. The proverbial turd flew through the ventilation duct, and the stench will linger for a lot longer than their PR departments will like.
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Re: GoDaddy Drops SOPA Support
It is indeed too little, too late. Some reports say that GoDaddy may have lost as many as 70,000 domains in the last week, with half of those on Friday and Saturday. Wikipedia and Cheeseburger Network were among those leaving altogether.
Re: GoDaddy Drops SOPA Support
Especially since Godaddy likely wasn't thinking ahead in that, should SOPA pass, a TON of their business would be killed by it since corporations and pretty much shut you down for anything.