GoDaddy No Longer Supporting SOPA Legislation

GoDaddy, a giant domain name registrar, has announced that it is no longer supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act otherwise known as SOPA, which is now making its way through U.S. Congress.

GoDaddy announced that it pulled its support for the controversial SOPA legislation on Dec. 23. This was after several Web site owners said they were going to find somewhere else for their business.

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 in a statement. 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.

GoDaddy has said that it offered its support to SOPA because it wanted to do away with piracy. However, the company now said that in changing its position, it will keep its promise to support security and stability of the Internet.

GoDaddy's statement noted that the the company and its general counsel, Christine Jones, have worked with federal lawmakers for months in helping to craft revisions to legislation first introduced some three years ago.

The released noted that Jones fought to express the concerns of the entire Internet community as well as to improve the bill. Proposing changes to key defined terms, limitations on DNS filtering to ensure the integrity of the Internet, more significant consequences for frivolous claims and specific provisions to protect free speech were some of the improvements sought, GoDaddy' release highlighted.

As a company that is all about innovation, with our own technology and in support of our customers, Go Daddy is rooted in the idea of First Amendment Rights and believes 100 percent that the Internet is a key engine for our new economy, Adelman said.

Jones added that Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future.

Adelman told PC World that it's clear that the SOPA bill isn't ready in its current form.

Looking at this over the last 20 hours, we're not seeing consensus in the Internet community, we're hearing the feedback from our customers, he added.

Reports are that Reddit user selfprodigy on Thursday, said he was pulling 51 domain names from GoDaddy because the registrar was in support of SOPA.

Ben Huh, CEO of the Cheezburger family of humor Web sites also said that his company would move its 1,000-plus domains off Go Daddy if it didn't pull its support for the bill.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales on Friday also threatened to take his business elsewhere.

Their position on SOPA is unacceptable to us, Wales tweeted.

SOPA would allow the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders to use court orders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.