geekosystem

Large swaths of the Internet was rendered unreachable on Monday due to what GoDaddy is essentially calling a router issue. After whatever it was that caused GoDaddy's services to hit the Internet equivalent of a brick wall happened, an unidentified hacker claimed that the outage was caused by a distributed denial-of-service attack on the provider. These claims were never verified, however, so the reality seems to actually be technological incompetence on the part of GoDaddy.

The Wikimedia foundation has announced that the organization completed the transfer of popular online repository of all human knowledge Wikipedia from GoDaddy hosting this past Friday. The move has been a long time coming, with several reasons motivating the change over -- not the least of which was GoDaddy's support of SOPA, which contrasted greatly to Wikipedia's opposition of the proposed Internet regulation.

When GoDaddy's public and unapologetic pro-SOPA stance initially came to light, the backlash was big enough that GoDaddy backed off its "support" to something a little more lukewarm and moved to "not supporting SOPA," but dancing around the issue more than actually opposing SOPA. Now, GoDaddy has come full circle and claims to oppose SOPA in an about-face that has occurred at a pretty staggering speed: 1 week. The cause of this speed is doubtlessly because of the loud voices, particularly those of reddit, railing against the registrar nonstop, calling for a boycott, and advocating the transfer of domains. Their efforts seem to have worked, although the boycott itself may not be as responsible for the change as we all might like to think.

After coming out and supporting SOPA, domain registrar GoDaddy caught a lot of flak. After catching said flak and "reversing" their stance, they are still catching a lot of flak. That being the case, there are all kinds of little apps popping up to help you increase the amounts of flak, one of which is ByeDaddy.org, which makes it trivially easy to see who has a domain with GoDaddy. It's worth nothing that the cleverer, more intuitive, but creepily-named domain, StopDaddy.org actually redirects to GoDaddy's homepage. Looks like they saw that one coming.

It looks like GoDaddy's confident support of SOPA and fearlessness in the face of a boycott has already crumbled. Not even a day after all the press, GoDaddy has released a statement that they no longer support SOPA. The statement reads:

"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," Warren Adelman, Go Daddy's newly appointed CEO, said. "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."

For the most part, the technically-inclined world is against SOPA and it seems that only big businesses like Viacom and Universal Music Group are for it. There is one strange exception though: GoDaddy. After customers started asking about the company's position, GoDaddy came out with this statement, one of the few arguments for SOPA. Needless to say, this has a lot of people upset, the kind of people who have a number of domains, the kind of people who are now calling for a boycott.

GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons recently returned from safari in Africa, and uploaded a video of his adventures to the web. This may seem innocuous enough, but the video was about Parsons' elephant hunt, where he hunts and kills "problem" elephants. The video shows the elephants being shot at, Parsons posing with the killed bull, and a group of locals in GoDaddy hats butchering the animal for its meat. Parsons says that his hunt was beneficial for the locals, whose crops are sometimes destroyed by raiding elephants. But his explanation has failed to quell critics. PETA, (whose site happens to be hosted by GoDaddy), has dubbed him "the scummiest CEO of the year" and announced its intention to switch hosts. A rival company, NameCheap, has offered a special deal to new customers who transfer from GoDaddy where 20% of their fees will go towards elephant conservation. Others are simply criticizing Parsons for spending what is a no-doubt substantial sum of money to kill elephants, instead of providing non-lethal ways to locals for defending their crops. Though Parsons' critics have been vocal, their criticisms are unlikely to lead to many direct repercussions for the elephant-killing CEO. GoDaddy is a privately held company, and Parsons does not answer to a board of directors, nor does the popular reaction for or against him have any impact on the company's stock. As it appears that Parsons was engaged in a legal elephant hunt it is almost certain that charges will not be brought against him. But whether Parsons' elephant shoot was smart PR is an entirely different matter. The video is embedded below. Be warned, it is graphic.

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