GoDaddy was for SOPA before it was against it.
GoDaddy’s new CEO Warren Adelman on late Thursday issued a statement acknowledging the negative effect an online boycott has had on the company’s total domain registry numbers, and clarifying that GoDaddy is now vehemently opposed to the House of Representative’s maligned Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
Adelman’s statement provided to TPM reads as follows:
“We have observed a spike in domain name transfers, which are running above normal rates and which we attribute to Go Daddy’s prior support for SOPA, which was reversed,” said Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman. “Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.”
That’s a distinctly different standpoint than Adelman offered to Gizmodo just six days ago, on December 23, when he said the legislation wasn’t “ready in its current form,” but that GoDaddy would be willing to support it in the future if there was a consensus from other Web companies around it. It’s also a much stronger anti-SOPA stance than Adelman gave in a statement backing down from SOPA support posted on GoDaddy’s website the same day.
But even those statements were drastic departures from GoDaddy’s earlier statements and actions staunchly supporting bill, which the company has since deleted “in an effort to eliminate any confusion about its reversal on SOPA.”
When initially confronted with the possibility of an online protest, GoDaddy bristled and doubled down on its SOPA support, publishing a blog post on December 22 recycling pro-SOPA statements from executive VP Christine Jones and turning off the comments, The Next Web reported.
GoDaddy also acknowledged that it “worked with federal lawmakers for months to help craft revisions to legislation first introduced some three years ago,” although it has yet to confirm whether it was behind an exemption for takedown notices and liability within SOPA that would apply to GoDaddy and other domain registrars, but not non-profits or universities.
Adelman’s latest statement on Thursday came in the waning hours of the culminating day of a week-long protest of GoDaddy over its previous support of SOPA, in which outraged GoDaddy customers pledged to switch their domain hosting business away from GoDaddy to its competitors.
The boycott of GoDaddy, dubbed “Dump GoDaddy Day,” was proposed by a user on the social news website Reddit on December 22. The protest picked up steam as several successful Web entrepreneurs and companies joined in, including Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, Cheezburger’s Ben Huh and the image sharing website Imgur, to name a few.
Yet the day itself appears to be something of a bust. Domain monitoring website Daily Changes indicates that only 15,524 domains were transferred away from GoDaddy on December 29 as of 6 pm ET, far less than than the 28,656 transferred away from GoDaddy on December 25 and not even enough to really make a dent in GoDaddy’s overall numbers given that 17,549 people registered new domains with GoDaddy on Thursday.
Meanwhile, in a strangely but truly ironic twist, GoDaddy is also fending off expensive lawsuits filed by several rights holders within the entertainment industry over GoDaddy customers allegedly posting pirated content, as The Hollywood Reporter pointed out.
Besieged by both customers and Hollywood, there’s no denying that GoDaddy’s new CEO Warren Adelman, who assumed the mantle just days before the controversy began, is in an unimaginably tough position. It’s nothing like his former good old days as GoDaddy’s Chief Operation Officer, or the time he starred in this goofy GoDaddy advertisement.
