So if you’ve been living on the same planet as I have the last month or so, you’ll have noticed a bright new acronym floating around the web: SOPA. That foul four letter word stands for the “Stop Online Piracy Act”, which has been heralded by critics (including yours truly) as the end of the internet as we know it. To give a very concise description of what the bill does, it basically allows ISPs to block any website that they suspect of copyright infringement without due process (or even proof of cause).
What does this mean for you? Well, to put it succinctly:
Say you upload a video of yourself to YouTube, and since you’re a cool guy you record the first 20 seconds of Madonnas olde time hit, “Vogue” as your title theme. Now, if a Sire records executive happened to see that you were using copyrighted material in your video on Youtube, they could have Youtube SHUT DOWN IMMEDIATELY. Today, just searching for “Vogue” on Youtube returns over 176,000 hits. Can you imagine how much user created content will be lost because of fear if SOPA passes? Scary. Granted, this is an extreme case, and probably wouldn’t play out exactly this way. But the real question is, do we want people who understand nothing about technology making decisions like this about the future of the internet? I vote no.
I digress. The reason we’re here is to protest the evil of the registrar world that is GoDaddy. Not only do they practice misogyny in their advertising campaigns, but they inundate their web interfaces with ads and upsells for crap that the average user doesn’t need. And in this day and age, most average users will buy it without understanding that they don’t need the ridiculously priced garbage that GoDaddy pushes onto them at every page reload.
So lets say for a moment, that you’re okay with GoDaddy using provocative ads and promises of pornography on their TV commercials to get you to buy domains from them. You’re even okay with them trying to sell you products you don’t and never will need, much like a car salesman (or Fry’s sales “associate”). Heck, you don’t mind that their CEO goes big game hunting and shoots elephants for sport. The one thing that you should at least mind is that GoDaddy, through this whole SOPA thing, has been the biggest damn liars ever to grace the internet. And there are some big liars.
In the beginning, GoDaddy supported SOPA fully. Hell, they even helped pen the sections where registrars are exempt from the bills nasty internet destroying side effects. Then, the Reddit troves came in, started transferring all of their domains, and GoDaddy started to lose money. So, GoDaddy said, “Okay, we no longer actively support SOPA”. Of course, that means that they passively support SOPA, which is just as bad. So the transfers continued. Today, they released another statement here. At first glance, it would appear Reddit has won and GoDaddy is receding their support of SOPA.
but NOPE, it’s Chuck Testa!
If you read carefully, you’ll notice that GoDaddy doesn’t say they’re actively opposing the bill. Bad form, GoDaddy.
At any rate, like everyone else, I suggest you migrate your domains to a better, friendlier registrar.
I suggest Namecheap.
Thanks
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