Last Thursday, the tech community rallied together against GoDaddy after learning that the domain registrar supported the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act. Spearheaded by users from the Internet community, reddit, the boycott against GoDaddy quickly spread into an Internet-wide boycott asking for users to transfer their domains registered at GoDaddy to another website.
At first, GoDaddy acted in defiance, reposting a blog post on their website that explained their support for SOPA and releasing a statement to Ars Technica Thursday evening that said “Go Daddy has received some emails that appear to stem from the boycott prompt, but we have not seen any impact to our business.”
The statement only further enraged GoDaddy’s customers and giants like Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales. Wales tweeted “I am proud to announce that the Wikipedia domain names will move away from GoDaddy. Their position on #sopa is unacceptable to us.” The same sentiments were echoed by the founder of the Cheezburger Network, Ben Huh.
In less than 24 hours, GoDaddy began feeling the pressure from the Internet-wide boycott and reversed their support for SOPA, explaining their decision in yet another blog post. The previous post regarding their support for SOPA has since been deleted from their site.
While some sites have reported this as a victory for customers, the tech community is still skeptical of GoDaddy’s reversal and the boycott has not ended.
According to an interview with TechCrunch, GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman could not commit to changing its position on the record in Congress. He went on to say “I’ll take that back to our legislative guys, but I agree that’s an important step.”
But when pressed, he said “We’re going to step back and let others take leadership roles.” He felt that the public statement removing their support would be sufficient for now, though further steps would be considered.
