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Go Daddy loses thousands of customers

by on26 December 2011



Support of the Stop Piracy Act makes it a Pariah


One of the most stupid business moves of 2012 looks set to cost domain registrar Go Daddy a fortune.

The outfit came out in favour of  Stop Online Piracy Act which if it ever sees the light of day will see US websites switched off when ever a music or film industry body asks. Last week Go Daddy ignored the fact that all its customers, and the tech industry were violently opposed to the Act and put out a statement that it had its full support.  It the bill goes through, Go Daddy will have to go through all its customers websites and delete those who make references to music or films without paying Big Content huge amounts of cash.

What it did not realise is that not only would this make it an internet Pariah, its customers would leave an outfit which wanted to be the brown shirts for Big Content. In one day, Go Daddy lost over 21,000 domains as its customers voted for the stupid policy with their feet.  Already Anonymous has declared war on the site.

An anti-Go Daddy thread on social site Reddit led to the creation of Godaddyboycott.org, a site set up to let people amass their disapproval with the company's support of SOPA. To be fair  Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman realised that he was making no friends by backing the SOPA and reversed course and dropped its support for the controversial legislation.

"Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it," Go Daddy announced in a statement.

The question is, who is doing Go Daddy's PR and thought it would be a good idea to dump on their customers like that.

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