GoDaddy on Friday said in a public statement that they have backed down from supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act, more commonly referred to as SOPA.
While executives at GoDaddy continue to maintain that firing internet piracy is an important part of their business they also state that the backlash felt by their customer base was enough to convince the company to back down.
According to CEO Warren Adelman:
“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why GoDaddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better.”
General Counsel Christine Jones followed suit, taking down a post in support of SOPA.
While privacy experts are thanking GoDaddy for their change in position the damage may have already been done as several of the company’s biggest domain holders jumped ship including the I Can Haz Cheezburger network which is run by founder Ben Huh and features more than 1,000 domains.
In response to GoDaddy’s fault in judgement rival Namecheap began actively protesting the company and offering discount codes to have users jump ship to their service.
Under SOPA a media company would be able to ask that an entire site be removed even if only a very small part of that website in some way violated copyright laws. SOPA would also make it hard to contest those charges which in turn would hurt freedom of speech.
The SOPA initiative would also break internet security since the rules for DNS blocking would violate DNSSEC, a measure that the US government has promoted as a way to stop “poisoning” attacks that can take over sites.
Do you think GoDaddy can win back the trust of their fleeing customers or have they already shown their anti-privacy hand too much?