Crossroads Blog | CYBER SECURITY LAW AND POLICY

Current Affairs, Legislation

SOPA Boycott Gets Results

Talk about the power of internet organizing.  About a day or two ago, users of the social website Reddit caught wind that GoDaddy (a web-hosting company) supported SOPA.  The users of Reddit (which number into the hundreds of thousands) are fiercely anti-SOPA, and as such, launched a huge boycott campaign.  The campaign called for everyone to transfer their domains from GoDaddy to some other hosting company. 

Well, it worked.  It began when hundreds of Reddit users began posting screen shots of their domain transfers.  Then it continued with Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia fame, tweeting that "I am proud to announce that the Wikipedia domain names will move away from GoDaddy. Their position on #sopa is unacceptable to us."  It succeeded when GoDaddy did a complete 180, and in a press release, said "Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" currently working its way through U.S. Congress." 

There really is a passionate, home-grown resistance to SOPA, and it will be interesting to see how other protests take shape.

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