Within days of refusing to cancel domain names calling for the assassination of Julian Assange, GoDaddy, a domain registrar and web hosting company, demands another site remove content.
GoDaddy demanded the removal of a controversial article concerning a top CIA operative in Pakistan, leading to the source of a story that went global being taken offline.
At the start of the month, GoDaddy demanded that “PakNationalists” removed an article that discussed a potential court case against Jonathan Banks, the CIA’s former Islamabad station chief who was accused of being responsible for allegedly illegal drone attacks on parts of Pakistan.
The article, which was removed but can be seen from the Google cache, was called “CIA Station Chief In Islamabad Sued For Murder And Terrorism.”
GoDaddy has refused to inform PakNationalists who made the request to ask them to take down the site in a strongly worded email. “We ask that you either remove the content…or move you” – “Please be aware that this decision [to remove the content] is final, and is not up for debate.” Gulpari Nazish Mehsud, a volunteer for the website says it doesn’t take a “genius to guess who it is”.
Vivantleakers is chronicling domain name registrations and other websites calling for the death of the Wikileaks founder.
Recently, Twitter and other social network sites like Facebook and Skype received subpoenas to release records for individuals related to Wikileaks. Only Twitter bothered to defend its users by going to court and having the order unsealed thereby allowing them to notify the individuals. Efforts are underway to quash the order.
Was GoDaddy served a court order or did they censor customer content entirely on their own? At any rate, any illusions we may still hold about net neutrality, they were long gone when EveryDNS, Amazon, PayPal, VISA, MasterCard and Bank of America all chose to violate their contractual obligations.
GoDaddy has been successful with an aggressive marketing campaign employing the old “sex sells” strategy. As the company has grown, however, so has its list of dissatisfied customers, (me included) and there is a website NoDaddy documenting many of the reasons to distrust the company… add this action to the list.
