A Small Orange is offering a discount to those transferring from Go Daddy
Every now and then, an exciting or controversial issue triggers a flood of online discourse. For our Noise Filter feature, the WHIR pans the raging rivers of opinion for shining nuggets of useful commentary.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — It seems that many web hosting providers did not publicly announce their stance on the Stop Piracy Act until this week, while Go Daddy was dealing with the aftermath of its decision to support the bill – a decision it quickly retracted after its customers furious response.
The hosting industry has been rallying against SOPA and the Protect IP Act for some time, and through the Save Hosting Coalition has sent letters to the US House Judiciary Committee in opposition to both bills, after all, if the bills were to pass, it would impact web hosting and cloud service providers greatly.
After the whole Go Daddy fiasco last week, many web hosts came out via blog posts and official press statements to tell their customers about their thoughts on SOPA, an issue that many basic web hosting customers probably had very little idea about until recently. Rackspace, HostGator, A Small Orange, Dreamhost, and Domain.com all released separate announcements denouncing the bills.
It is clear that while many web hosts took a jab at Go Daddy in their press releases and blog posts (some supporting the Dump Go Daddy Day on December 29), others focused on providing resources for customers to understand the proposed legislation.
In a blog post on Beta News on Wednesday, Joe Wilcox says that customers energy would be better used on focusing their anger at the legislators rather than at Go Daddy.
Why focus all that anger on Go Daddy, or any other SOPA supporter, when legislators in the House and Senate who proposed the Stop Online Piracy Act, and sibling PROTECT IP ACT (PIPA), have the power to pass a bill into law? Wouldn’t boycotting them make more sense? Or letting President Obama know how you would feel about him signing rather than vetoing the legislation? We are entering a big election year in just a few days, after all.
Tim Worstall, in a post on Forbes, says that customers vote all the time by deciding where to spend their money.
We can see that the consumer dollar can stop companies from doing what we don’t want companies to do. The flip side of this is that if we all quite happily spend our consumer dollars with a company then we’re not actually unhappy with what the company does. Remember this the next time someone tells you how appalling it is that WalMart closes down Mom and Pop stores just by the very fact that they open an outlet. If we the consumers preferred the Mom and Pop stores then we would spend our dollars there and the WalMart would be empty of customers.
In a blog post on HostGator, Patrick Pelanne compared SOPA to a genetic combination of ” Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Darth Vader and Barbara Streisand”. Like many other hosts, HostGator is cashing in on the controversy against Go Daddy with a promotion: half off the first month of shared, reseller and VPS hosting with the coupon code NOSOPA.
The bill itself is absurdly broad, creates a ton of liability for small to mid size e-commerce based businesses and will serve to stifle the tech industry in order to cater to lobbying groups paid by companies who refuse to adapt to a world in which free information is king (and almost as unstoppable as a force of nature).
Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier took to the company blog to outline its stance on SOPA on December 24. Napier says that “key lawmakers are pushing a cure (SOPA) that’s worse than the disease.” While Go Daddy turned off comments on its SOPA post, Napier invited customers to share their thoughts on SOPA with him directly, providing a link to his email address.
Meanwhile, SOPA would require that Rackspace and other Internet service providers censor their customers with little in the way of due process, trumping the protections present in the current Digital Millennium Copyright Act. What’s more, the SOPA bill would seriously disrupt the Domain Name Service that is crucial to the smooth operation of the web.
The SOPA bill, as it stands, is a deeply flawed piece of legislation. It is bad for anyone who uses the Internet, including Rackspace, the more than 160,000 business customers that we serve, and the tens of millions of retail customers that they serve. It is bad for job creation and innovation.
As a member of the Save Hosting coalition, DreamHost released its opposition on December 27 through a press release, claiming that if SOPA passed, inexpensive web hosting would be a “thing of the past” as the overhead needed to police the new law would be costly. While the tone of the press release was playful, (“When DreamHost employees were first told of SOPA and its potentially devastating impact on customers, there was stunned silence, followed by raucous laughter, followed by a very uneasy silence, followed by much shouting”) DreamHost CEO Simon Anderson says that SOPA is a flawed concept not in tune with American values.
It undermines the freedom of expression enjoyed by all Americans online, and removes the safe harbor protecting web hosts established by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. SOPA will create uncertainty for American entrepreneurs and stifle innovation, hurting American jobs and investment at exactly the time when the economy needs a boost from small businesses. We’re part of a coalition of leading web and Internet companies asking that Congress do the right thing and reject SOPA.
Director of operations at web host A Small Orange Jen Lepp outlined its detailed stance against SOPA and provided a 25 percent discount for customers looking to transfer domains and hosting away from Go Daddy.
SOPA shifts this burden from the copyright holder to the online service, whether the service is Twitter or Facebook or a hosting company like ASO or a registrar. Many people also believe that it bypasses legal protections of free speech and due process for controversial sites, making the consequences of a mere accusation the near-instant destruction of the site before any infringing activity is proven. It places service owners in a near-impossible and costly position of policing all content on its servers.
In a press release, Domain.com invited “like-minded domain owners” to transfer away from companies that have shown support for SOPA, and also offered a coupon code for those wishing to transfer. Domain.com marketing director David Andrews said the company respects the rights of intellectual property owners, but SOPA goes too far.
The uncertainty it would create for website owners and the resulting chilling effect on the tech industry is a serious issue the Internet community should not take lightly.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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