Up until very recently, GoDaddy was a staunch supporter of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. That all changed when users of Reddit – and many other people on the Internet – decided that the best way to protest was simply to move away from GoDaddy.
In the beginning, this doesn’t seem to have had any effect on the GoDaddy team. They even said that:
Go Daddy has received some emails that appear to stem from the boycott prompt, but we have not seen any impact to our business.
Despite being in a position where they should know better, they were the only registrar in the list of 142 companies and organizations that supported SOPA. That all changed earlier today. As ICanHazCheezburger CEO Ben Huh, Wikipedia and many others were added to the list of people threatening to leave GoDaddy, the message changed.
I am proud to announce that the Wikipedia domain names will move away from GoDaddy.Their position on #sopa is unacceptable to us.
— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) December 23, 2011
Here’s what GoDaddy are saying now:
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. 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.
To be honest, this is a prime example of being too little too late, and the people who wanted to leave GoDaddy should probably continue to do so. I haven’t got anything hosted there, but I know for sure that I’d be amongst the people leaving the service today if I did.
Poor GoDaddy, they can’t catch a break. This less than a year after their CEO slaughters an elephant in Zimbabwe.