Late last year I moved most of my domains that I was hosting with GoDaddy to a new registrar, and the rest will follow closer to expiry.
For those who don’t know, in October, Lamar Smith, a US congressman, introduced a bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The bill is a hideous monstrosity allowing the US government to, in essence, break the internet. While the bill only has jurisdiction in the US, and its consequences will be severe there, so much of the internet as we know it is based in the US, and this puts things at risk worldwide. I’m not going to discuss more about SOPA now, but here are some SOPA resources if you want to read more.
SOPA Resources:
- ReadWriteWeb infographic
- Wikipedia – Stop Online Piracy Act
- Electronic Frontier Foundation on SOPA
- CNET article on SOPA
So SOPA’s a bad idea, and almost everyone in the online world has come out strongly against it. However, the world’s largest domain registrar, GoDaddy, initially released a statement strongly supportive of the bill. GoDaddy have been in the news before. In early 2011 their CEO, Bob Parsons, videod himself shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe, leading to a boycott led by PETA.
But with their support of SOPA, they very quickly ran into much more widespread opposition. It began with a thread on popular news site reddit (which could not host in the US if SOPA was passed), and was given further publicity when Jimmy Wales announced that Wikipedia would be moving its domains.
There are many companies that support SOPA, but the main reason GoDaddy have been successfully targeted is that it is so easy to move domains. After a domain is registered, you normally forget about it, and it simply generates ongoing income for the registrar each year. However, moving is painless, a once-off process, you can again forget about it, safe in the knowledge that your money won’t be supporting GoDaddy each year.
Since I started moving, late last year, GoDaddy backtracked, and SOPA has faced increasing opposition and almost certainly won’t be passed in its current form, as even Barack Obama has come out against it.
Who did I choose as an alternative? There are a large number of top-level registrars accredited by ICANN, the non-profit group that effectively administers the internet (and which took over from the US government in 1998). As far as I know, the only South African company accredited (for .biz, .com, .net and .org only) is Internet Solutions – everyone else will be a reseller.
Moving gave me an opportunity to decide who I wished to support, and I eventually settled on Gandi.net. They’re a well-respected registrar based in France, and in 2010 they were the 27th largest worldwide. They will also donate $1 from every transfer to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and besides opportunistically taking advantage of the publicity, they consistently provide real support to a number of other worthy institutions, such as Creative Commons, Debian, the WWF and Spamhaus.
Investigating prices, their annual fee of $15 was $3 more than GoDaddy, but after deciding to move I was surprised to see they were only charging $8. I had the option to pay in Euros, but when I chose this, the rate went up to 9 Euro, or about $11.65. I went back to pay in dollars!
I wrote most of this post last year, and it appears since that the boycott and widespread opposition have been successful. Even the US president has now come out against SOPA in its current form. Still, removing some of the more insidious clauses doesn’t make for a good bill, but the spotlight is clearly shining, it’ll be difficult to sneak anything through, and companies will be resistant to publicly supporting something like this after the GoDaddy debacle.
Although there are always some that are immune to any criticism…