Hosting provider GoDaddy loses 70.000 costumers

The American hosting provider GoDaddy released a statement withdrawing its support for the Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as SOPA. Unfortunately for GoDaddy, this statement came a bit too late, as already 70.000 costumers terminated their contract with the hosting provider. Also Wikipedia announced it would move away from GoDaddy.

Last week GoDaddy announced its support to SOPA and received a lot of criticism from its costumers. As a result, rivals of GoDaddy seized their competitor’s pro- SOPA lobbying to lure GoDaddy’s costumers away. Registrars such as Dreamhost, HostGator, Hover.com and Name.come have offered SOPA-related promotions with attractive deals for costumers. On 29th December, NameCheap for instance, launched a “move your domain”- day offering below-cost transfers with the coupon “SOPASUCKS”.

Because of the high resistance against SOPA, game developers Nintendo, Electronic Arts and Sony Electronics have also withdrawn their support to SOPA. SOPA is a controversial bill, which prescribes extensive measures to fight Internet piracy. In case SOPA enters into force, copyright holders will be able to shut down domain names and advertising networks, in case they are connected to illegal file sharing sites, without a judges intervention.

Read more about SOPA on FutureOfCopyright.com:

• SOPA debate postponed to January next year
• Controversy around SOPA proposal
• Republicans amend SOPA proposal after criticism

References: Nu.nl , CNET

By: Deniece Teterissa