Wikipedia owner ditches Go Daddy over SOPA support
The Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit group that owns amongst others Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia, confirmed on Friday it has completed a domain name transition away from Go Daddy.
But the final straw came as the domain name registrar came out with its supported the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
San Francisco-based MarkMonitor now manages the portfolio of websites. A domain name WHOIS lookup confirmed the new domain name registrar for the wikipedia.org domain.
After the online news-sharing site Reddit protested the move by the domain name registrar, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced on Twitter that the range of wiki-powered websites would move away from Go Daddy after he found its position on SOPA to be "unacceptable".
Over 21,000 domains were transferred by customers to different registrars the same day as Wales' tweet.
Go Daddy reversed its decision after it came out in support of the draft bill, which would allow copyright owners to force Internet service providers to block access to vast swathes of the Web.
On January 18, Wikipedia --- along with Google, Reddit, and thousands of other major websites --- blacked out their pages in protest of the SOPA and PROTECT-IP (PIPA) bills that were at the time being debated in Congress.
Both SOPA and PIPA were shelved and voting was suspended on the bills indefinitely shortly after.
Image credit: Who.is/ZDNet.
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- Reddit will enact ‘nuclear option’ to protest SOPA, PIPA
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- SOPA: Why the ‘broken web’ should stay broken