Actually that's exactly what I thought when I saw the list yesterday. Several of those companies send people to Demo Day, and when I saw the list I thought: we should stop inviting them. So yes, we'll remove anyone from those companies from the Demo Day invite list.
Are you guys going to stop using Mastercard, VISA, and no idea who your internet provider is but if its Comcast, them too?
I did another thread on here regarding this as well and I'm curious how far people are willing to go to prove a point or are they only singling out whatever makes sense. The above three have some strong strong monopolies or close to it so it makes things much harder. GoDaddy just happens to be one of the easy ones people can choose to switch from.
I don't speak for everyone but personally, I'm not against all companies that are pro-SOPA, just the Internet firms who I think should know better. As for others like the music or motion picture industries, I understand and respect their support for SOPA.
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The sheer complexity of the Internet makes it difficult to understand and defend against attacks. You may be unaware of vulnerabilities that affect your network.
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While the brochure makes it sound like standard netsec training... I find the wording of a "Cyberwarrior Training" program to be... surreal. Further, I think it is pretty sick to market such services to a government that clearly is clueless about the internet in general. (not the defense industries - the political arms of the government)
The reason is that it is probably easy to market this service to politicians who want to appear savvy:
"Look, we need more cyberwarriors on the net - we need to block the firewalls of the cyber criminals. This is the next fronteir in protecting our nation!" --- *For the low cost of $150,000 per cyber warrior. No guarantees apply. Check you state for local restrictions.
I am talking about marketing the program to congress/political figures in charge of funding for the training.
THey would not be the ones taking the training - but the ones spending tax dollars on a service they really don't understand - thus the likelihood for abuse is higher.
I err on the side of corruption when anything pertaining to governments is concerned. Call me paranoid.
YC is an investor and has a standpoint. YC is promoting anti-SOPA support outwards and towards its (independent) portfolio companies. KKR is also an investor and also has a standpoint.
But its not KKR listet on the pro SOPA list its one, and only one of there portefolie companies. KKR are not (in the same way as YC isent) responsible for its portefolies standpoints.
They are not legally liable, which is different from being responsible. Imagine if one of their portfolio companies was a child porn distributor. You wouldn't defend KKR, because clearly they have some choice in who they put in their portfolio, and a child porn distributor is an immoral choice. Holding a SOPA supporting company is also a (albeit less egregious) poor choice. Taking away invites of their portfolio companies provides motivation for them to look into this sort of thing when choosing companies in the future.
They're an enabler. You punish them the same to inspire them to push pressure downward on everyone they work with.
Remember when Glenn Beck was still on Fox and people were crying continuously? Nothing worked until they started boycotting the companies advertising for him.
I'm talking to my Congressman on the phone right now. What do you think should be altered so the bill can achieve its original purpose? Or will nothing help?
I think it's very hard to make anything help. Here's a shortlist of things that should be fixed to avoid it horribly hurting innocent people, but I doubt it's enough - there seems likely to be more things in there. The original purpose of the law seems to be "Give the 'intellectual property' industries a blunt instrument to attack perceived violators", so making it less blunt probably violate the original purpose anyway.
Stop removing DNS entries; that's attempting to censor things that aren't in the US for non-US citizens.
Require a full court proceeding to stop advertisements and payment processing in the US - ie, no "court order", it has to be a full lawsuit with the ability to defend.
Require the removal of access to only affect a specific, listed set of companies.
Require the company requesting the blocking to pay reasonable costs of blocking.
Remove the making of copyright infringement into a felony; each of these things can easily happen by mistake.
You could try saying "nothing". Hollywood is actually doing quite alright, piracy or not.
Alternatively, you could suggest Ron Wyden's OPEN bill. OPEN nixes the the DNS filtering, but keeps some of the follow-the-money measures in SOPA. More importantly, it also requires a full court hearing before any action can be taken.
Actually it looks like Visa and MC were some of the most reasonable in the hearings -- they said there would be lots of costs to comply, and while they didn't support visa/mc being used for any illegal activity, ...
I'm sure you've seen the list of supporters (http://1.usa.gov/t7Wpo8). Even the list itself is a half-assed job by pro-SOPAs to illustrate Congressional support for the bill.
Unless, of course, the fragrance company Coty Inc has been seeing a lot of their fragrances being pirated online.
Even though the national/local press does not follow this very closely in Europe, we are making as much effort as possible to bring it to everyone's attention in order to stimulate participation along the same lines as yours. where possible I/we shall boycott over here also.
Just wondering here -- would you go so far as to consider the domain registrars of YC hopefuls when going through the application process, or would their choice hold essentially zero weight in whether they get accepted or not?
I doubt it'll become a topic of conversation what your registrar is..but if it does happen to come up and you happen to say GoDaddy, judging from pg's post above the answer is probably yes, he will hold it against you :)
Funding a company that supports a company that supports SOPA is just one step away from supporting a company that supports SOPA...which in turn is just one step away from supporting SOPA. Scary, isn't it?
Yes, no problem. F*ck every last one of those companies. The only two that I still have no real choice but to support would be Comcast because of my local ISP monopoly (I can get 512K DSL from SBC [ATT] or 100mbit Comcast...not really what I'd call a "choice") and MasterCard because my credit union does not offer debit cards via AmEx.
That list would be a whole lot shorter if you removed the names of Law Firms. Why are they even on there? And the Congressional Fire Service supports SOPA? That's "stretching it" for supporters.
Yes, but I was rather inquiring about whether it was even possible to do so. That list is huge and most likely growing. One of the companies on the list is McGraw-Hill Education. I have to use their products at my school - how do I get around that?
It doesn't really matter which textbook manufacturer you get your books from. They are all morally bankrupt institutions. The entire textbook industry is a scam.
I love how you can pick nearly any topic in almost any subject(especially computer science) and find an amazing book for free, or for about $60, yet every textbook my school uses gets < 2 stars on amazon and costs $150.
My "favorite" was a biology book written by a guy with a B.S. in journalism. He published the book years ago and every year he releases a new edition with the chapters out of order.
Buy used textbooks whenever possible. If you're stuck in one of those situations where there's a new edition every year, make sure to ask the instructor if you can use the previous edition.
Discover? I've been a happy customer of theirs since the 90s, and their coverage has gotten near total within the US. Sparser in other countries, though.
With my credit union in California, wire transfers are $20 + 2-3 business days. This is cost prohibitive. Western Union is similarly pricey. Dwolla is an interesting competitor ($3/mo for unlimited instant transfers), but it needs wider adoption before it can be used directly.
In Sweden wire transfers within Sweden[1] generally do not have a per transaction cost and most utility bills are paid through wire transfer. Recently many online stores have started allowing purchase with invoice (many use a company called Klarna[2] which handles the sending of invoices and the risks) which you then have to pay through wire transfer.
1. I think it is usually free to all EU countries too as long as you use IBAN.
How is this relevant? I don't spend much, and use cash in real life. But I need a card for online purchases for my business (hosting, etc.) and for access to my bank accounts in a different country. Maybe I can replace most of it with wire transfer, but Amazon, Rackspace, etc. won't accept it.
It's a compromise. If VISA and MC bother you in this context, use them less. You can't practically eliminate them, but you can, if you choose, reduce their use.
They already pay the licencing fees to the respective music labels, so if SOPA gets passed they'll be one of the few legal music streaming sites remaining. If SOPA is used to full effect then it's plausible they could get a larger market share.
I suspect one reason is that they get process a lot of chargebacks when people's fake Viagra and counterfeit NFL jerseys get seized by Customs before delivery.
I'm going to piggyback on your comment here, since it's at the top of the comment thread.
From the Reddit link:
"Name Cheap messaged me with a special discount code for reddit users: BYEBYEGD I'm not taking any positions i'm just reporting it. I asked him to give reddit users a better deal."
I'm not affiliated with NameCheap at all, but if you're going to move your domain, this might make things easier.
I transferred my domains to NameCheap from GoDaddy during their last PR nightmare. I wish I had done it sooner. NameCheap's interface isn't the best in the world, but not having to use GoDaddy's site is worth more to me than 5x the transfer fees I paid. Plus the domain privacy option is bundled, meaning cheaper domain registrations ($11 for a .com vs. $17 at godaddy -- at least for the first year).
I've decided to go with Name.com as it seems Namecheap is a reseller of ENOM, who I haven't particularly cared for (no reasons I can link or substantiate, just my own personal experiences and opinion on this one.)
I've been seeing a lot of recommendations for NameCheap, but there is one thing that makes me hesitate: I get a staggering amount of spam from domains registered by NameCheap with the Whois info shielded by WhoisGuard. Yes, I've used their reporting tool to report spammers, but it still comes.
Is this about scammers flocking to NameCheap because it's, well, cheap? Or is NameCheap somehow marketing to spammers while trying to maintain plausible deniability? I'd be happy to consider moving my sites over to NameCheap, but I don't want to move from one evil registrar to another registrar.
I have all my domains at NameCheap and have never gotten any spam (or maybe google blocks it all?).
Either way, I'm happy. I haven't tried http://en.gandi.net/ but they are bit more expensive.
I've been using Gandi for 11 years. They've generally been great. Initially I was drawn to them because they were one of the first registrars to make it clear you owned the domain name and they were an agent.
I've kept with them largely because of the generally convenient and low-upsell nature of the website on top of this.
One caveat for U.S. customers: on the very rare (once or twice a decade) occasions when I've had to contact customer service, the time separation and some rough English skills have led to a slightly bumpy communication experience while resolving issues, but even with those obstacles, they're better at it than GoDaddy (and their English is a heck of a lot better than my French :).
~$15usd/yr rather than $7ish a year isn't a big deal for domains I care about.
I like Gandi's motto ("no bullshit"), but their support is - for lack of a better word - exactly that. It's now hovering at 36 hours without a response after repeated emails to them. No excuse. I'd rather pay the $10 extra and get real phone or live chat support from anyone else. Avoid.
Employee here. GoDaddy does care very much about their registrar roots. The fact that we have over half of all registered domain names is a source of tremendous pride, and unlike the elephant scandal I'm willing to venture their registration will not go up because of this, namely because there doesn't seem to be any support of SOPA from consumers, educated or not. And Godaddy's users are decidedly less technologically educated, generally speaking.
"but no one who still has a domain at GoDaddy will be entitled to complain about SOPA if it passes."
I was going to complain about this sentiment from someone not that rich and who can't afford the fanciest red polo shirts money can buy ha ha, but then I said forget it, for what it truly costs to move a domain it's far less then the cost on our liberties if SOPA passes, so I went outside shoveled a few driveways and earned enough money to move over the domains I have without cutting into my budget. There really isn't a reason for people not to do this.
Along those lines. It seems pretty important to do what you think is right, even if it's effect on convincing others of your correctness seems negligible.
In the past godaddy has invited (and thrived) based on negative publicity as well as questionable sales practices. (Godaddy girls, exploitation of women, the elephant hunt as a few examples).
"Most of what we are seeing is either 1) rhetoric, 2) regurgitated lobbying spin, 3) criticism of language we have already fixed, or 4) retweets by people who like to steal music and buy fake, but cheap, goods."
Ugh.
(oBDisclaimer: I work for a registrar that unequivocally supports the Open Internet."
In case anyone was suspicious, Nima Kelly (the author of the comment supporting Christine) is one of the GoDaddy legal department heads. Needless to say, she and Christine are quite familiar coworkers and friends.
You can't reasonably support free speech in all instances, just like you can't reasonably support an "open internet" in all instances. There have to be some exceptions.
It's the listing of those exceptions and how you deal with them that's the tricky bit. So saying "I support an open internet" is just ignoring the issue.
My list of what should be legally restricted in its availability is as follows:
1) Child pornography
End list.
National security is not enough of a reason for restrictions. Copyright is not enough of a reason. Further, the assumption that corporations or governments have exclusive moral authority to determine what constitutes impermissible material is, frankly, ridiculous. Giving them the authority to make such decisions is destructive, to both freedom and economy.
Obviously this is an extremely touchy subject, but I think the fact you have even one exception shows you are not grasping the problem here.
So in your country, "Child" may mean <18, while on the other side of the world, it's <21, or maybe even <16.
Even more troubling, the clothes that many teenagers choose to wear in many western countries are clearly considered pornographic in nature in other more conservative countries.
It just makes no sense to say "There are no exceptions. Except this one, that can be interpreted in hundreds of different ways". Once you leave it for interpretation, the scope will expand and expand until children are being listed as sex offenders for taking photos of themselves.
> Obviously this is an extremely touchy subject, but I think the fact you have even one exception shows you are not grasping the problem here.
Or we are discussing two different things, which is completely my doing.
I was thinking of speech in the constitutional sense; I was not speaking of domain seizures. I completely agree that the government/corporations should not have the power to seize domains under any circumstances.
(Although eminent domain might be an interesting angle to consider, although that is another beast entirely.)
grecy wrote in response to our common parent comment:
> > I was thinking of speech in the constitutional sense
> Remember, many countries don't have a constitution and don't care for yours.
For some reason I can't see a reply link under hir answer, so I'll just leave this here:
Constitution is neither the only one, nor the most effective assertion of unalienable freedoms. Since the aftermath of WW2 there have been many Charters, Conventions and Declarations of all sorts, many of them accepted ("ratified") by many countries alongside their local laws.
Just for future reference about "For some reason I can't see a reply link under hir answer".
I believe that the deeper a thread is, the longer it takes for a reply link to appear on a comment. This is to prevent endless flamewars, which immediate replies facilitate.
It is not well defined what "porn" is. In my country it is, as far as I know, perfectly legal to distribute photos of nude children, as long as they are not engaged in a "sexual act". cf. the art of David Hamilton.
This will most likely result in heavy downvotes, but I don't think child pornography is a problem. At all. There's something else we should be fighting, and the Internet has nothing to do with it: child abuse.
I also find it highly ridiculous that politicians (at least here in Germany) still spout crap about "international, millions of dollar heavy child porn rings" or similar nonsense.
I'd wager[1] that most child pornography is either a) documented domestic abuse of children by relatives or b) jailbait (ie, suggestive or explicit pictures of legally underage, but physically mature persons).
For the former, we're fighting a symptom. As I said, we need to fight the cause, child abuse. But there's a problem with that: it's a long term process, and a difficult one at that. Demanding the takedown of websites with child pornography works way better to get yourself elected.
For the latter, I'd go as far as to ask the following: who is hurt by people with a paraphilia involving underage persons[2] masturbating to images? Especially if those images were made in consent with or even by the person depicted?
[1] This is another thing about the entire child porn discussion: you can't confirm anything without getting yourself in all sorts of legal trouble. There was a good example of this here in Germany a while back, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joerg_Tauss
[2] I'm putting it this way because Pedophilia isn't the only such paraphilia, even though the term is often used to mean "attracted to underage persons", which is very wrong.
In the case of child pornography, banning the site really shouldn't be the whole solution anyway. They need to co-operate with law enforcement in those countries and arrest the people involved. Taking down their website domain won't do anything to deter the child pornographers.
This is why I believe the banning of child pornography sites is mostly used as an excuse to show "proof of concept censoring" and then use it to expand it to other stuff like copyright. This is why RIAA and MPAA love to use it as example that it's possible to censor them.
Child porn is how .au passed their censorship stuff and it has quickly expanded. Child porn is already illegal and, in my opinion, doesn't need deep cutting censorship bills to combat.
Understood and agreed. Existing statues on child porn are sufficient, and given the tendencies for governments and corporations to expand their abilities at the expense of the people, I would support no new laws, and would be suspicious were any proposed in my country.
Honest question, is it illegal everywhere? I'm just taking a stab in the dark that there are societies somewhere in this world that either haven't established laws or are terribly enforced if they do exist. Playing devils advocate what if a child porn site is hosted in that area, then what? I realize that the situation is unlikely but if it's possible wouldn't there need to be a way to handle it?
Politicians tried that line in Germany. They even gave a number of countries that have "no laws" or don't follow up on them.
For every country named, the ambassador to Germany was able to cite laws that prohibit child pornography (or just porn, eg. in countries with sharia law). In all cases, they stated interest in enforcement by their governments, too.
Given that they tried a couple of times, and failed just as often, I'll assume that no such country exists - otherwise some advisor to our local propagandists would have found and presented it on the second or third try.
Not too long ago in human history (and even today in some places and with some different forms) it was customary for young boys to orally pleasure old men, or wed off girls before or at puberty. Playing more devil's advocate, the only thing that should really be illegal is exploiting children when they can be shown to be incapable of sound personal choices. (So covering both child porn and Britney-Spears-pattern Disney stars at once.) Now we just have to worry about where we draw the line at exploitation and whether potential monetary or status gain is important or not. The main point though is the act has already occurred by the time some pedo sees it on a tor page, and I don't think it's ever been shown that pedo-consumers are much more likely to become pedo-producers if they weren't already. (Someone please correct my belief if that's not the case, and then explain Japan.) Of course, catching either the consumers or producers is fairly difficult without draconian, invasive practices, and on the producers side it reduces to the classic problem of domestic abuse.
I don't want to see any more young teenagers branded as sex offenders, a label they'll have to wear for the rest of their life, because they sent naked pics of themselves from their phone to a friend of theirs that's the same age.
I don't want to see parents being run through the legal system because they've got some pictures of their baby that happens to be naked.
I don't want to see someone being thrown in jail because they have some kind of manga which, under a broad definition, would qualify as this even though no actual children are involved.
Anything that involves abuse, pornographic or otherwise, should be what the laws focus on regardless of the age of the subjects.
If it was merely "child pornography" that could get your site taken down, then the first idiot teenager to post a topless shot of herself or a guy posting his junk, which you have to admit is disappointingly common, would get your site blown off the internet permanently.
With SOPA in place, Chatroulette, or anything like it, would never have happened at all.
If you're saying what I think you're saying, then I agree. There's no reason to block domains where cp has been posted. Rather, work with the owners to track down the perpetrators. If the owners won't work with you and are willing enablers, then seize their servers and traffic records and go after the perpetrators yourselves.
Censorship just stops people from seeing the content; it doesn't deal with any of the root issues.
That's a terrible idea. So if someone hacks my site and installs malware, my site should be taken down by the Government?
There are anti-viruses, browser plugins, and even the browsers themselves protect you from stuff like that. You don't need the Government itself to do it, and they wouldn't be any more effective anyway. They would just abuse the power.
Even those websites should be allowed. Should we provide counter measures to help the user decide of a website is legitimate or not, absolutely, but their right to exist shouldn't be tampered with.
So if a company starts infringing trademarks, polluting search engines en masse, tricking people into buying their rubbish, phishing their details, getting credit card details etc, you'd be fine with that?
What about people who DDoS attack you? Is that fine? No need to have any recourse there?
How about those that hack DNS to dupe people into visiting their site etc
Those are all "Open Internet", but they're also not very nice.
I don't think it's as clear cut as some make it.
I don't know if SOPA gets it right or wrong, or if the current laws are sufficient, but I'm glad we have some of those laws in place to make the internet a slightly nicer place.
Those things are already illegal and SOPA doesn't address them anyway. I think the important point is that the internet should not be restricted in an attempt to preempt any criminal activity (because it won't work). Instead, the internet should be left alone, and those who choose to do illegal things on the internet should be prosecuted.
"So if a company starts infringing trademarks, polluting search engines en masse, tricking people into buying their rubbish"
eBay? also, already illegal based on trademarks, copyright, etc etc.
"What about people who DDoS attack you? Is that fine? No need to have any recourse there?" "How about those that hack DNS to dupe people into visiting their site etc"
already illegal
--------------
from my understanding, SOPA is more about removing due process than making bad things illegal
So, how SOPA makes anything better?
You cannot blacklist a botnet, right?
You cannot blacklist a scummer, as he would just setup another domain, right?
Who you can very well blacklist is a small guy with his blog giving a honest opinion about reality, right?
Here, you're saying you don't know whether to support the warrentless censorship of websites you disagree with. Why are you saying two different things?
To me, Open Internet is the same as an open city. SOPA is like going into a city and shutting down a street corner because someone was heard quoting passages from a book or giving away pirated movies. It's ridiculous. Instead of closing down the website (the street corner) close down the people behind the site.
The US, instead of enacting laws that restrict movement, needs to put into place laws that make copyright infringement illegal. Oh wait, they already have them.
In short, go after the people not the domain. I want to be able to walk around the internet the same way I can walk around a city. If there are seedy places online then it is my choice to avoid them and not the governments right to simply declare them quarantined or off limits.
Its a networking issue, not a legal or political issue. Big Media has decided to go to the mat to defend their dying business model at the expense of the Open Internet by lobbying for legislation like this.
If you want to make the Internet safer, more secure, better for commerce, more accepting of DRM, whatever, then let's take that up as a technical discussion and figure out how to amend the infrastructure so that it continues to work. Hiving off slabs of address space and putting them under the control of national legislatures is the fastest and most direct way to ensure that the entire network stops working real quick.
I know probably many people would agree with stopping "cheap fake goods", but can people really not distinguish between originals and fake products?
If anything I wouldn't be for a law that completely bans the cheaper versions of the original. I'd be for a law that only makes it illegal to say they are originals when they are not. But I would allow them to be sold in the market, as long as they state it's a "clone" product or something.
It might or might not hurt the big corporations (would the people buying the cheap clones really have the money to buy the expensive originals otherwise?), but I think it would be much better for the market overall
Many "fake" products are manufactured in the same factory with the same materials by the same workers who produce the genuine thing, only they do it during the night shift. Keep in mind that a $3000 designer purse is really just a $50 purse with a $2950 designer label.
To put it frankly, godaddy don't give a shit. Their domain business exists as a way to get people into their other products, hosting, whois privacy etc. the ones that actually make money (nobody makes money on domains nowadays, savvy customers use coupons which godaddy provides a lot of). This won't do anything to Godaddy as a business, they'll be losing customers they don't care about -- unless people shutting off their other services too -- but if it makes people feel good then yay! This would be like walmart losing customers who do extreme couponing and only buy the products that serve as loss leaders.
You could go as far as suggesting these people are helping godaddy. If you take away 120 domains (as one redditor is doing) that godaddy are losing money on and you're only using them because they're cheap... that's a win for godaddy surely, unless the scale at which people do this makes a dent in godaddy's total customer/domain figures, which are a marketing point, but that would require millions to leave.
Even with their extreme coupon usage, from what I can tell they are still not using them as loss leaders (if we ignore all costs besides registry/icann).
You also neglect to see the effect of thousands or tens of thousands of savvy people actively changing their mind about a company and NOT recommending it to people or bad mouthing the company. My suspicion is, the kind of people reading HN/Reddit are also the type of people that get asked 'computery' stuff quite a bit. I know from personal experience I've probably influenced ~30-50 people's registrar choice this year. Even if it were 1-2 as the average number, the knock on effects could potentially put a nice dent in them.
>You also neglect to see the effect of thousands or tens of thousands of savvy people actively changing their mind about a company and NOT recommending it to people or bad mouthing the company
Savvy people have been badmouthing GoDaddy for years. Being recommended by the technorati simply isn't a part of GoDaddy's business model.
Here in Vancouver, there's a plumbing company called Milani. They hire bad plumbers, don't train them, and pay them poorly. They do shoddy work. Every other plumbing firm knows not to hire plumbers who used to work for Milani, and gets a significant amount of business going back to Milani sites to fix their mistakes. But, Milani takes out a full page ad on the front cover of the Yellow Pages. They advertise on bus stops and billboards. Milani spends more on advertising than the next 5 companies combined. When the average, uninformed person needs a plumber, they think of Milani. That's their business model.
GoDaddy is the Milani of registrars. They quite simply don't give a fuck whether they have a service worth recommending; they spend enough on advertising that they'll always have customers regardless.
I think it's silly to say everyone knows who fit a certain category. For example, look at Cheezburger moving away. I would have suspected he is fairly web savvy, you know, owning 1000 domains and running a giant blog network. But this apparently was the thing that called him into action. Plenty of room to spread the message and actually have people act.
Not sure what prices you're paying with godaddy, but the absolute base cost (assuming godaddy don't have deals with verisign) is $7.52. If I go to the godaddy site now I can register a new domain for $5.02 (current converted) and I don't believe I have ever paid over $7.99 for a domain at godaddy, most of the time I get it below $7. They also routinely do ($1 + $0.18 ICANN fee) domains as others have mentioned
Those '120 domains' they're talking about aren't newly registered. Most people have been renewing them with godaddy every year for $12 a pop ($15 for .org).
They do renewal coupons too, they often work out cheaper than initial registration (assuming you register for ~$8). For example, gdz1229c today will take 31% off of renewal, gets my .com renewal down to sub $8. Nobody is paying full renewal price unless they don't care about cost, it takes ~5 seconds to find a 30%+ off coupon, there are always a lot available.
I just tried it and was told that coupon wasn't valid for my order. I also tried googling around for more details without luck. Can you share a link to a coupon that says it's valid for renewals? It doesn't have to be valid anymore. Thanks.
I'll renew all my domains for the maximum time possible if it means godaddy will lose money on each transaction. Then I'll transfer them out.
-> My suspicion is, the kind of people reading HN/Reddit are also the type of people that get asked 'computery' stuff quite a bit.
This happens to be correct for me, I'm a computer technician (to pay the bills) And I supervise several other technicians. I know for certain that no one will be recommended to go to godaddy if they come to us. And thought it's a local thing I can see it being reasonable that many of the same local shops like mine have employees that visit reddit and HN. It's obviously too early to tell but I think it's going to trickle down until they (godaddy) feels it.
How many people actually do that though? GoDaddy's model seems to be like the banks over in UK - offer a great introductory rate (with a 'bonus' that expires after a year) and then allow customer inertia to set in.
The fact that you can switch and that it makes financial sense to do so does not mean that people will.
Strange logic. If they don't care about their domain business, why are they in it? Even if it's just a loss leader, you still care about the loss leader or you wouldn't continue running it.
The reason this thread is about domain transfers is because GoDaddy is at large known best as a domain registrar. If they were primarily a hosting company/etc., this thread would just as easily be about transferring your hosting/etc.
I'm skeptical of this claim. Registrars pay ICANN something like 7 cents a year per domain and they resell for $10+. That's a nice chunk of change there. Toss in SSL certs for at least that much, you're probably making decent money just on these alone. The hosting and other crap is just more services. I'd say low-end hosting is the loss leader here. Its a commodity industry.
I personally don't use them because I find their advertising extremely distasteful and find the UI to be worse than anything AOL has done in the 1990s.
Where are you getting that information? ICANN fee is $0.18 and then the registrars pay a cost for the domain to the company that oversees the TLD. For example, verisign oversee .com and they charge $7.34 per domain registration, so a registrar pays $0.18 + $7.34 as their base cost per .com registration.
I have been using GoDaddy for years. I'm just using it for a simple webpage+domain hosting and email. It works but I'm probably being overcharged since I don't bother with coupons. I have always been annoyed about the privacy complaints I've seen about them, but never cared enough to switch. Now I do care enough to switch, thanks.
"I have always been annoyed about the privacy complaints I've seen about them, but never cared enough to switch. Now I do care enough to switch, thanks."
Lots of people probably have recommendations, but I've been using nearlyfreespeech.net for a couple of years for hosting my personal site. They're great.
On one cheap Linode VPS instance I already have 5 websites hosted, plus a personal email server, plus several private git repositories, all for ~ $20 per month. I get my domains from other services, like namecheap.com; and good/cheap hosting for PHP stuff (and even Rails) can be found on DreamHost.com.
There really isn't any reason for anybody to use GoDaddy anymore, unless you're hunting for their coupons, but in this instance you really get what you pay for.
And more often than not the coupons are good for the first year only, and transferring after that year (for me anyways) is a bigger PITA than the coupon savings offered.
Right now I'm hosting with Chunkhost, it was their free beta period that got me off the crummy shared account I was on with GD. I could never go back, now.
If you decide to move your domains from Godaddy, and if your DNS is hosted there too, and if you have enough DNS records to not want to recreate them, there's an undocumented way to export the nameserver records from Godaddy to another DNS provider such as Zerigo. In a nutshell (1) upgrade to Godaddy Premium DNS ($35 but refundable within 5 days) (2) Export each domain's DNS settings (3) Cancel Godaddy Premium DNS. Now you can quickly import your DNS settings at your new registrar or DNS host if they handle importing of bind files. Not everyone imports nicely, but Zerigo worked for me. Details here http://pardner.com/2011/11/how-to-switch-dns-painlessly-from...
Godaddy has to be one of the least trustworthy domain registrars I have heard of and I am surprised that people still use them. I guess their crass commercials must be drawing in the customers.
I've registered a few domains through Google Apps. At least the last time I did this GoDaddy was one of the places you might get randomly bounced to. It may have become the only place.
I moved my personal 25+ domains away from GoDaddy to name.com and gandi.net. Best move I have ever done. I don't get shitty advertisements emailed to me anymore, I don't have to jump through hundreds of hoops to purchase renewals where I get bombarded with advertisements for various other services.
And name.com is a small company here in Colorado, so I am supporting local while I am at it.
I still find this funny. I used to work for a web incubator called NAME (and had the name.com domain) in 1999-2000 before they went out of business in the .com bust. I always thought they had a great domain name. Not surprised it was snapped up by a registrar.
I think going after the supporters of SOPA one by one is a pretty effective method, if enough time. First let's go after the representatives who support it, and then after all the companies, and either terminate your account with them if applicable or at least e-mail them to express your feelings about them supporting SOPA.
I have a domain that's (shamefully) hosted on GoDaddy. Worse, I had the domain on a better registrar and I transferred it to godaddy.
I needed a registrar that was able to handle IPv6 glue records, which was rare at the time. (The TUCOWS-backed services only got this capability last month! Before that you had to email TUCOWS and have them manually add the AAAA records to your glue, which I didn't consider a solution.) For all their many flaws, GoDaddy was surprisingly ahead of the curve on IPv6 support.
I suppose by now some of the other registrars probably have gotten their act together. Anybody with experience running IPv6-hosted nameservers have recommendations?
You're forgetting the people and companies that bought domains back in the early 2000s who now have dozens or hundreds of domains on GoDaddy. People stay because it's easier than transferring. A lot of people still use them even for new domains because they're still the cheapest game in town.
For years, yes - years ago they were cheaper than anyone else and no worse than anyone else. It wasn't until last summer, I think, that I finally moved the last domain off of GoDaddy.
If you find one of the not-infrequent "Which registrar do you use?" posts, even on HN a lot of people still use them.
While I would never use them for domains, I did buy a $12 SSL cert back when everyone else was charging hundreds of dollars for the same thing. Before someone points me to a free SSL service, this was for an enterprise class application that was more about security theater than actual security. I was able to get away with GoDaddy instead of Verisign, etc. because my client used GoDaddy for their domains – go figure.
You don't have to wait until they expire! Transferring adds another year to your current registration, and you don't lose anything at all, unless you bought hosting at GoDaddy.
For basic website hosting, I've been very happy with HostGator. For about $7 a month you get unlimited space, bandwidth, and domains. It takes care of DNS for your sites (just point your registrar nameserver information at HostGator's nameservers), has SSH access, provides unlimited MySQL databases, and has a pretty nice interface.
I signed up with GoDaddy 6 years ago and have been using them since, stuck with them because it was easy but I want to move my stuff to Canada cause I know its safer here.
Yep. I registered my first domain with them about a decade ago. I've finally moved on to NearlyFreeSpeech.Net (don't really like their weird account funding thing, though) for a couple of new domains last year.
I would expect that SOPA on the whole would discourage domain registration and the general development of web properties amongst the masses so I'm a bit surprised GoDaddy supports it just from a business perspective.
Anyone care to enlighten me about what I'm missing here?
As I understand it SOPA results in a shift of the burden for policing content from registrars and hosts towards government bodies and the administrators of the DNS system. Alternatively-framed bills introduced in the name of combating piracy could have much more damaging implications for Godaddy.
I try to avoid helping anyone who needs help with their GoDaddy-hosted website. Not only is the interface atrocious (at least compared to DreamHost), I hate logging in and seeing Dana Patrick splayed out...if I want people around me thinking that I'm browsing Maxim magazine, I'll buy a Maxim magazine.
Why is anyone who pays any attention still on GoDaddy anyhow?
They're a scummy company that have no respect for their customers, obnoxious advertising, and a clunky, annoying web interface. Why would you use them when you could use any of hundreds of other name registrars and web hosts?
I've been thinking of moving away from GoDaddy for a long time, and this was the last drop. It is crazy how they design the webpages to make it as hard as possible to cancel anything. In the email I got, there were two (identical) links telling me how I could cancel the transfer-request, but no link to accept it. It took me a couple of minutes of poking around in my account before I figured it out.
I thought it would be interesting to see how many domains are moved away because of this, so I just knocked together this quick site - http://stopsopa.mattbearman.co.uk/
It would be awesome if anyone who is transferring domains away from go daddy could add their to the list
We recently moved most of our domains from GoDaddy and various other registrars to Safenames. And vased on reading their list of support TLDs they do support .it.
What I like about Safenames is the simplicity of their user interface, not the huge number of clicks required by many of the other registrars. Simple text areas where you just can paste the list of domains or a DNS zome file for example.
So... I know spams bad and all. But what about writing a crawler that sends a single email to the owner of every domain it finds hosted on GoDaddy? Just something that says "Incase you haven't heard, this is SOPA, this is what it means, GoDaddy supports it, this is how to switch if you decide to" type of thing. Sure, it's certainly in a grey area, but even if you could send out 10 million emails and 0.2% actually took action as a result, thats another 20,000 customers.
I was just going to ask the same. I've been thinking about moving away from GoDaddy for a while and this would be just another reason among many. I take it on a case by case basis whether I do business with a company, and I'll continue to do so with many that support SOPA (explicitly or implicitly) as much as I'm opposed to the bill.
There's that expression, "Don't hate the player, hate the game". In the same way that I'm not a fan of a basketball player flopping to draw a foul, I'm not a fan of a company supporting this bill. I totally understand why they do it, but it's not in the spirit of the game IMO.
The bigger problem is the way the game itself is set up. Most people think it's a good idea to hand over their power to a small group of people who get to make decisions for everyone. Businesses see this and figure out that they can realize the benefits of the larger group while only incurring the costs of catering to the smaller group.
Transferring my domains to https://dnsimple.com/ :) A little more expensive than the cheap registrars... but Anthony who runs the company is amazing! Shameless plug: he did some development work from the back in the day, and is one of the best RoR programmers in the world!
Embarrassed to still be on Godaddy when I vowed to move away a few years ago. And timing is unfortunate. I just paid them lots of $$ to renew everything.
Still, biting the bullet and (finally) transferring everything over now.
There's no need to move all your domains today (that can be a HUGE job). Just pledge to not give GoDaddy another cent and move your domains as they expire. In five years, problem solved.
haha, I think you're right, I could probably prune a bit. Domains can get addicting, but probably 15 to 20 are not related to anything but late night ideas. :)
S/he's saying you should only buy things on which you're pretty sure they're losing money, so that you're actively hurting them by buying them. It's like buying a PS3 and never buying any games - I suspect people buying PS3's by the truckload to use as Linux clusters is what made Sony pull the Linux support.
The purpose of loss-leading products/services is to get consumers to purchase other things and that is where they make a profit. If a large enough group only purchases loss-leading products/services and don't purchase anything else, GoDaddy should be at a loss.... until they change their pricing models, and then you can just boycott them all together.
Eniugh people dropping the service altogether + recommending against it when asked for advice would probably deal a larger blow. Especially if Godaddy can no longer claim the top spot and ride that popularity to get people to sign up that *don'tV only buy loss leaders
I bet most of the people smart enough to know about SOPA and fight it are not the people godaddy makes the majority of its profits on (ie, their "privacy" features, email and web hosting with all the unnecessary bells and whistles)
I always do a coupon search, or just take the code from whatever their lowest Google ad price is. Just google "domains" they're always the first ad for me, and it's usually 4.99, 5.99, or 7.99 at the absolute most. (For .coms)
Careful, they'll autorenew those at a much higher price. Mine went up to $100+ when it renewed last month. I'm kicking myself for being stuck with that cert, especially since the GoDaddy badge isn't exactly the mark of trustworthiness.
I am writing to you to inform you that because of GoDaddy's continued support of SOPA I am transferring my domains to a different registrar as soon as I can(they were renewed recently so I have to wait).
I read your press release today and I felt that you didn't actually respond to a bulk of the criticism of SOPA, that is that takedown requests can be filed by private parties and the respondent is legally required to remove the content before even considering challenging the takedown request. This obviously presents a large challenge to sites based on user-created content.
A world with SOPA is one in which businesses can't run websites with user-generated content without having a legal team on hand.
SOPA is bad for the open internet and if GoDaddy refuses to look into the issue and actually give a reasoned, intelligent response(as opposed to the "well, we have to stop piracy!" argument your press release made -- yes, something should be done about piracy but SOPA is NOT the answer) then GoDaddy, too, must be considered bad for the open internet and I will stop hosting my domains with you and stop recommending my clients host domains with you.
Ive been using bluehost.com for 3 years to host 3 websites. I could list them but I dont want to spam. They have everything I need and I have seen no significant outages or price increases.
Anyone here use Godaddy? How are their prices and service?
I don't use any of their services except domain registration, I keep my WHOIS up to date, and keep my names regularly renewed, to avoid any mishaps, I have never had an issue.
I have used their hosting in the past, and I wouldn't recommend it to a professional, but would to someone who wants to post pictures of their cats, or run a low traffic personal wordpress blog.
ive used them for 6 years, never had a problem. vps for 2 years was comparably cheap however if you have config problems you pay out the wazoo OR figure it out yourself. The two times I was desperate enough to need to call support I figure out the problem myself while waiting on hold/waiting for a reply.
Please can we at least try to ensure HN doesn't go the way of Reddit?
I'm against SOPA as much as the next guy, but it's a moot issue. Browsers will just release new versions that use alternate DNS systems or get past any 'blocks'.
There's nothing uglier than an internet hate/protest mob.
To say it's a moot issue because there are technical work arounds is pretty naive. I seriously doubt any major browser would ship with a work around to this...I don't know why you assume they would.
This sentiment is exactly the root of the problem. If "the sky started falling" at exactly the moment when governments erected police states or attained excessive powers then they would be blocked from having those powers.
Instead, these things tend to be two stage processes. In stage 1 the government attains new powers in order to further some generally positive goal. However, in stage 2 the lack of safeguards on that power leads to abuse and excess but by then it's already too late to easily roll back or block that power.
If we wait until the sky is falling then we will have waited too long. We need to ensure that personal liberties have strong protections, both offline and on. Failing to do so won't lead to immediate disaster but it will lead to making it nearly impossible to stop a disaster as it's happening.
It helps raise awareness and reach others who are not HN and Reddit regulars too and by extension reach others several degrees out. That's the first step in affecting change i.e. educating others and getting the word out. If you don't attempt to do this, nothing will happen. Its not a waste. A waste is exactly what you suggest, sitting idle while shit happens and you choose not to do anything simply because you feel its a "waste". That's ignorance at its best.
A world without Youtube, Flickr, Etsy, and Vimeo. Plus the suppression of future innovative startups, all at the behest of dying media companies grasping for control.
If you think SOPA is a moot issue, you aren't paying attention.
"""I'm against SOPA as much as the next guy, but it's a moot issue. Browsers will just release new versions that use alternate DNS systems or get past any 'blocks'."""
I really can't stand this kind of stance.
Technical workarounds are NOT AN ANSWER to law/political problems.
At best, they are a kludge.
At worst, they get illegal, and some people end up in jail.
It's nice to have them, but only as a last refuge.
The number one priority is to have a sensible legal/political system, not to work around it.
I know, there is already an entire site for discussing reddit posts, it's called reddit. Why not just repost the source article here? I don't think that a bunch of redditors moving their domain names is particularly newsworthy, but the Godaddy issue is.
For those interested in switching, Dreamhost offers an affiliate program, and I have created a discount code with the maximum discount of 5 free domain registrations (a 75$ value). Simply use the discount code REDDIT5FREE when joining!
"SCREW GODADDY" is on a loop in my head right now.
Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but no one who still has a domain at GoDaddy will be entitled to complain about SOPA if it passes.