Slashdot Mirror
GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat
crush writes, "An Irish website RateYourSolicitor.com, which aims to let clients find and rate solicitors (a British Isles flavor of lawyer), has received an Irish High Court injunction to remove defamatory material about one such rated solicitor. The site is hosted by a US provider, gmax.net, which has reportedly been served notice by lawyers acting for the defamed solicitor. According to the article, GoDaddy, as the domain name registrar, has locked access to the site (registration or bugmenot required). (Amusingly, the records are all for a 'John Smith' in the Russian Federation at 'lawyercatcher@lawyer.com'!) An interesting twist to all of this is that according to the Communications Decency Act, an ISP, as a publisher, cannot be held responsible or legally liable for what their clients do. So how can GoDaddy justify this censorship? Or are registrars the weak link in a system that seems like it ought to be robust against censorship?"
Perhaps GoDaddy is blocking them not out of pure censorship, but because this scandal has revealed that one of the domains they manage doesn't have correct WHOIS information, which many registrars require in the TOS?
We ostensibly have freedom of speech, and don't legally ban things like hate speech as they do in France, for example. Instead we use our corporations to enforce the same kinds of restrictions against "offensive content" and such.
In this case, GoDaddy's TOS includes this gem:
So any jackass could shut you down by threatening to sue GoDaddy. Niiiice.
"Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one."
[TOS = "Terms of Service", you know -- the huge page of small print that you scroll past in order to click the "I agree" button.]
GoDaddy's IPO attempt failed last month, as their Net company continues to lose money. They're spinning as "we didn't want to go public, anyway". But maybe they've got bigger problems.
After all, GoDaddy is owned by a Conservative making his fortune from domain squatting. I expect there's quite a lot going on under the hood. I'm looking forward to his explanation, as are many, many people who registered with GoDaddy who expect due process before sudden shutdown.
--
make install -not war
But GD was already on my don't do business with list when they tried to trick me into transferring my own domain to them. Mine is paid through 2008, and they sent several e-mails to the contact address basically implying that to save it I needed to transfer it to them quickly and pay more money. I despise that tactic from any domain registrar of trying to poach customers in this manner.
Having very sexy women in their TV ads isn't enough to make up for the above.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Freedom from Government censorship isn't worth anything when corporations can make an end run around them and shut you up.
You can't go anywhere now and put out fliers because there's ordninances against it. You can't broadcast online because ISP's shut you down when you say something "objectionable enough".
We need free speech zones on the internet that do not depend on corporations or Government.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Perhaps slightly off-topic, but which registrars would you guys recommend who have a proven track record of siding with the registrant?
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