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Albanian domain registrar kicks Neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer offline

The site was booted offline by an Albanian domain host, after the neo-Nazi site briefly sought refuge.
Written by Zack Whittaker, Contributor
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(Image: file photo)

The Daily Stormer is offline -- again.

The controversial racist and neo-Nazi website was kicked off the internet by its most recent domain registrar, just hours after the site's owner Andrew Anglin announced that the site was once again online.

Host.al, an Albanian domain registrar, confirmed in an email to ZDNet that it has "blocked" the site after receiving complaints. The company said it had also seen "a number of tweets" pointing at the issue.

Members of the Anonymous Albania collective had reportedly contacted the domain registrar.

"Domains that incite racism, hatred or crime are not allowed in the .al zone," said a registrar spokesperson.

According to the rules (available in English) that govern the .al top-level domain zone, sites that contain "abusive, insulting, racist names, words related to crimes or misbehavior and those that conflict with the good customs and traditions" can be blocked.

"As a side note, Albania has been one of the countries that has always taken a stand against racism," the spokesperson added. "During WW2, Albania was a safe haven for many Jewish refugees from other countries."

The Daily Stormer was pulled offline around 12:30pm ET.

At the time of writing, the site was still available in US, but was down in the UK and parts of Europe -- likely a result of slow propagation of the global domain name system.

When reached, Anglin said in an email that the block was "the beginning of full-on internet censorship," and that "it is now obvious that this is a CIA operation."

It's the latest internet drop-off in recent weeks, after the site was promoting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a protester was killed.

The company was first dropped by its domain registrar GoDaddy for violating its terms of service, and then Google also canceled the site's service later that same day. Cloudflare, a long-standing advocate of free speech and not picking and choosing its customers, also pulled its site protection services from the site, leaving it vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks.

The site eventually took to the dark web, which can only be accessed through the Tor anonymity network.

Gizmodo reported Monday that Stormfront, a long-standing neo-Nazi website, had also been knocked offline. Its domain registrar, a division of Web.com, said that after two decades of service, Stormfront was in "clear violation" of the company's acceptable use policies.

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