By Chad Henderson
A few weeks ago, I wrote a bit about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Luckily for us, congress has not passed the act yet, but will continue to debate it when they return from their winter break. There are good indications that the act will not pass as it is currently written, which is good news for anyone that likes the internet as it now exists. Supporters of SOPA, such as notorious domain registrar and hosting company GoDaddy, continue to come under scrutiny, however. GoDaddy was recently outed as a supporter of SOPA and apparently even had a hand in guiding the creation of the act. GoDaddy is the only real 'internet' company to appear on the list of supporting businesses that was released by the House Judiciary Committee and the fact that any internet company would support the act has surprised and baffled the professional internet community. Since being revealed as supported of SOPA, GoDaddy has seen a mass exodus as outraged customers transfer to other domain registrars and hosting companies, losing over 37,000 domain names in the first few days. Users of the popular community news site Reddit even organized an official "Move Your Domains Day" on Dec 29th, 2011 and created a Boycott GoDaddy website to encourage others to make the move. The total number of domains moved away from GoDaddy so far is not known, but it is thought to be as many as 80,000 or more. The Boycott GoDaddy movement gained enough momentum and garnered enough national press that GoDaddy, which had originally reiterated their support for the act, has decided to bend before the storm and have their name officially removed from the list of supporters. On Friday the 23rd, they released an official statement reversing their course. They did not say they would oppose the act but did state that they would support the act only "when and if the Internet community supports it". This sudden change of course for the most powerful domain hosting company in the world speaks to the power of community sites such as Reddit to organize and empower customers to be heard at national and international levels. Because of this, involving your business in politics can be very dangerous and should be done with care and thoughtfulness, especially when you attach yourself to controversy such as SOPA. Will you move, or have you already moved, your domains off of GoDaddy? Let us know in the comments.
Chad Henderson is a new blogger for RACK59.com. He will be writing about local and national technology issues, the internet and the innovative community in Oklahoma.
About Chad: Chad Henderson is a UX/UI designer and front end website developer, podcaster, twitterfiend and general purpose web geek. After teaching himself HTML by using Lynx, he started his first company, Dreamchasers Web Services, in 1994. Chad is also a founding partner of the Oklahoma City Coworking Collaborative, and can be found there often.
Today, Chad blogs about the Stop Online Piracy Act.
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In the next few days, Congress is going to be voting on what may be the biggest threat to the Internet, as a medium for the exchange of information, that we have seen since the DMCA reared it's nasty head back in 1996. H.R. 3261, known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, may unintentionally (or possibly intentionally) neuter the world wide web as a place of free speech and force websites such as Wikipedia to disappear from our browsers. If you are not familiar with the bill that was introduced by Texas Republican Lamar Smith earlier this fall, SOPA is intended as another tool for copyright holders looking to stop the illegal use of copyrighted materials on the internet, especially by those websites and servers that are hosted outside the US. SOPA gives the Department of Justice the ability to force ISP's to block any website that is suspected of having infringing content. Pay particular attention to the word 'suspected' in that last statement. The action the DOJ can take, can occur before a website has been proven to break any laws. It must only be suspected by a copyright holder to become a target. SOPA would also allow the DOJ to force payment services such as Paypal and ad networks such as Google AdWords to stop doing any business with the suspected site. The bill could even prevent the website from appearing in search engine results. These steps would effectively vanish the site from the internet. And not just the infringing content, but the entire site. The effect on a website could be financially devastating. Imagine YouTube or Facebook suddenly vanishing from the web, simply because a user posted a video that contained a copyrighted song in the background. This scenario seems unlikely (and I will admit that it is) but is nonetheless a possibility within the vague wording of this bill. Wikipedia is so worried about the possible ramifications of this bill, that founder Jimmy Wales is contemplating a site-wide Wikipedia blackout in protest of it. Sites such as I Work For The Internet have also appeared to garner grass roots support among internet professionals hoping to get the word out. Learn more about this legislation and contact your representative to make sure they understand what is about to happen, too. Related sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/sopa-hollywood-finally-gets-chance-break-internet http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/12/i-work-for-the-internet-tell-congress-how-you-really-feel-about-sopa/ http://iworkfortheinternet.org/ http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show