Under intense pressure from Internet-wide privacy, local CEO GoDaddy has given the open Internet an early Christmas present: it dropped its support for the Stop Online Piracy Act. The announced changes are a sentence Posted to Ars Technica:
Go Daddy no longer supports SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” currently working its way through the US Congress.
“Fighting online piracy is paramount, which is why Go Daddy is working to help craft revisions to this law—but we can clearly do better,” said Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO. , said. “It is very important that all Internet partners work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support when and if the Internet community supports it.”
GoDaddy’s climb down shame took just 24 hours. The boycott began on Thursday on reddit (the Ars sister site), but it quickly spread to the wider Internet. GoDaddy’s competitors started offering special deals with promo codes like “SopaSucks” to entice GoDaddy’s converts.
In the beginning, GoDaddy was hostile. In a statement emailed to Ars Technica on Wednesday evening, the company said that “Go Daddy has received some emails that appear to be from the boycott target, but we have not seen any impact on our business. .”
But this reaction only angers GoDaddy customers. And apparently, the impact on their business began to show more on Friday.
GoDaddy said that during the negotiations on SOPA, the company “struggled to address the concerns of the entire Internet community and to advance the bill” by pushing to make the bill’s provisions smaller. But now the company has been forced to admit that the bill’s authors did not adequately address the concerns of the Internet community.
“In changing its position, Go Daddy stands firm in its promise to support the security and integrity of the Internet,” the company’s statement on Friday read. GoDaddy said it has removed past posts expressing support for the law from its website.
Originally published at 1:47pm ET and updated.