I haven’t blogged here in a while, but I felt compelled to do so recently by the controversy regarding the SOPA act in Congress.
Why is the bill so bad? You can read how the SOPA Bill violates the Constitution by creating blacklists and opposing free speech. Since the bill also allows sites to be shut down without an adversary proceeding (a court or administrative hearing) it effectively allows anything to be shut down first, with questions asked later (if the party can afford it.)
From a small business perspective,  a company could have their site on a server that is a “shared” server. If one of the other tennets has an infringing site, the entire server could be shut down, and you’d be collateral damage. I can’t support that in any case.
By creating this bill, our government would have the power we criticize in the “Great Firewall of China” and other oppressive regimes. Hey, remember when Pakistan blocked Youtube and YouTube became unreachable for almost all of the Internet? (The link documents that happened in 2008. Whoops, we just took down your company. Sorry.) That is the kind of thing we’re talking about here – and new measures are being created so governments and groups can’t do this intentionally or by accident. If this kind of power is legislated, it will leave technical holes in the Internet where all sorts of abuse can happen. Don’t take it from me, read the “father of the Internet” Vint Cerf’s position on SOPA.
I mean, if the right-wing Heritage Foundation can oppose SOPA at the same time the lefty EFF opposes SOPA, there is something seriously wrong with the bill.
Even though GoDaddy allegedly no longer supports SOPA, their support before they chose to change is enough to make me question working with this company going forward. That, and the fact they use women as sex objects to sell their services. As a father of a daughter, I’m voting with my feet and my wallet against this practice. I will be doing more as soon as I make sure I know where all the DNS entries go so I don’t mess up this blog, my email and other business-critical things. There are a bunch of different registrars who will take your business, and Lifehacker has a great piece on ditching GoDaddy.
So, goodbye GoDaddy. I’ve just started to transfer away 17 domains, more are coming.
SOPA and the Senate’s equivalent are bad laws. Â I’ll stress again that I’m for businesses being able to protect their intellectual property, as long as they find methods that don’t break the Internet in doing this.