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Without knowing exactly what's going on it's difficult to say. My better nature thinks that hopefully this is not a case of moral arbitration on the part of GoD

Without knowing exactly what's going on it's difficult to say. My better nature thinks that hopefully this is not a case of moral arbitration on the part of GoDaddy. It's quite likely if the site has generated huge amounts of traffic it could be counted as impacting services and this is why they need to move or perhaps get DDOS protection to prevent that. Giving godaddy's history I have my doubts that's the reason. Since this is not the first time GoDaddy has done similar things I do not know why anyone would continue to use GoDaddy for anything. I want the employees of GoDaddy to be politically active and participate in the democratic process but I do not GoDaddy as a company to be the moral arbiter of things. The CEO of GoDaddy, maybe not the current one I haven't kept up on things, has had his own troubles yet I don't recall him getting completely canceled by the company. This kind of Jim Crowesque behavior from companies always ends badly. This is literally what happens when people are single issue zealots. They seem completely incapable of understanding that the reasoning that they apply against their single issue will eventually turn around and be used against them. What we need is laws that companies cannot be moral arbiters. If companies do choose to become moral arbiters then all protections against them are removed. You cannot cancel someone because you do not like what they say and then turn it right around and claim common carrier status therefore you are not responsible for something else you're hosting. Yeah this is what we see repeatedly with a number of these companies they wish to feign ignorance and common carrier status but they also wish to selectively police things.

wombatmobile 5y ago
> My better nature thinks that... I'm not sure what you mean by "better" or "nature". It sounds like you may have some form of structure in your thinking that clearly delineates "politics" from "business" and "morality". Can we explore that a little? Do you consider it is the role of SCOTUS to be the moral arbiter of women's bodies? If not, and SCOTUS has overreached, whose role is it to push back against SCOTUS' activism? Nobody? Everybody? Somebody? The answers to these questions are not mathematical, scientific, or technical. They are political. If your "better nature" excludes companies from participating in the political process, how does it feel about companies donating to political parties e.g. to facilitate the building of oil pipelines across exempt areas of land, or to rezone land for mega warehouses, or to bust unions, or to facilitate casinos?
- christophilus 5y ago
  Not then OP, but companies donating to political parties seems like a pretty obviously bad idea, and I wish we would ban it.
  - threatofrain 5y ago
    At this point it's a US Constitutional matter. Nothing short of a Supreme Court shakeup or a Constitutional amendment would do anything.
- salawat 5y ago
  > Can we explore that a little? Many people do structure their thinking that way for the simple reason that business molds itself to it's container; the shape of which was previously defined by a combo of politics and technological feasibility. >Do you consider it is the role of SCOTUS to be the moral arbiter of women's bodies? No, but they are the legal one. Two different things there. >Who should push back? Citizens have duly elected representatives and Senators to sort that out. The continued conscious decision not to sort it out, is alas, a Hallmark of the carefully laid checks and balances of our system to keep the frivolous or overly controversial from getting rolled into the law of the land... Nope, couldn't keep a straight face. Intent is there though. >If your "better nature" excludes companies from participating in the political process, how does it feel about companies donating to political parties e.g. to facilitate the building of oil pipelines across exempt areas of land, or to rezone land for mega warehouses, or to bust unions, or to facilitate casinos? The political landscape is arguably better off without business being able to directly effect it via campaign donations/lobbying/writing bills. Business should inform. Not drive, politics. I also find companies making political donations at the behest of management to be suspect, especially since no one generally asks the laborer where the company should rout their political interest slush pile. Not that I was asked. Just had an answer in mind and figured I'd share.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  A political war of all against all massively raises the costs of expressing a viewpoint which other people don't like. That makes it harder to participate in the political process, and easier for the powers that be to discourage any political participating which they find inconvenient. (As a commenter says above though, I do think that in this particular case the takedown was probably not politically motivated.)
toomuchtodo 5y ago
(Reference to Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission removed here) Businesses have the right to do business with whom they choose, and if you choose to not host a site that was built to violate someone's rights, that is your choice. No one is entitled to a platform. Let the Texans receive snail mail reporting folks for attempting to exercise their rights, or others attempting to help them exercise their rights.
- elmerfud 5y ago
  Actually the LGBT cake you have a very big misunderstanding of what that was. The person was more than willing to sell them a cake because he did not discriminate in his business on who he sold his items. What the disagreement was on is he did not want to perform the artwork on the cake. What was upheld is you cannot enforce an artist to do work for you against their own opinions. This is a completely different thing. They were not asking GoDaddy to create their website or perform any task other than the hosting of it which is the selling of the cake. If GoDaddy chose not to create the website and instead referred them to other places for their creative work that would be the correct comparison. This is the lack of History that we seem to have in this country currently.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    I removed the example because it was a poor analogy. Regardless, a webhost or cloud provider is within their right to turn away anyone's business, including if it violates their Terms of Service (which is open to broad interpretation by the business). Can't discriminate against a protected class of course, but that's not the case here. The law, as it currently stands, cannot force a technology provider to provide a platform for content if they prefer not to host it.
    - elmerfud 5y ago
      The point is not about what the company is able to do legally. Because the legality of things is the lowest possible bar that we could set in our society. It's a really poor excuse to do something and say well it's not illegal. My point is this excessive moral arbitration that causes the exclusion of people and entities from society is a very dangerous path to head down. We should want individuals to make moral and political decisions and participate in the processes that allow for change and remediation. By having companies both large and small become the moral arbiters and forcibly excluding people from the participation in society will only ever end badly.
sithadmin 5y ago
This is really very cut and dry: GoDaddy's terms of service prohibit use of their services for harvesting PII without express consent from the person whose PII is being collected. The anti-abortion activists' site openly invites the public to doxx 3rd parties, and hence violates the policy. The anti-abortion site is not functionally that dissimilar from something like a site that allows doxxing ex-romatic partners or the like, and both represent low-value forms of distasteful speech that frankly, no private service provider ought to be obliged to faciliate. While GoDaddy could be politically or morally motivated here, this just seems like a fair application of the policy.
- scarmig 5y ago
  dontdatehimgirl.com is a website that indeed lets women dox exes, and its DNS provider is... GoDaddy. ETA: I agree that that TOS provision is good and should be enforced, but it's no coincidence who gets the hammer for violating it.
  - sithadmin 5y ago
    The anti-abortion site is getting traffic, press coverage and activist attention in ways the site you mentioned (probably) doesn't. 'The nail that sticks out gets hammered down'. Even if the fairness in terms of TOS accountability here is in practice unfair, I think leaving issues to bubble up organically rather than implementing some sort of heavy-handed machine moderation/content monitor system (looking at you, YouTube) is probably preferable.
  - France_is_bacon 5y ago
    It is impossible to monitor millions of websites, so I'm sure GoDaddy relies on people reporting the situation to them. Report dontdatehimgirl.com and see what happens. Post your results on here.
  - 93po 5y ago
    It looks like the site you linked doesn't do that anymore. It's just a marketing site for a book as far as I can tell
dragonwriter 5y ago
> What we need is laws that companies cannot be moral arbiters. The thing is we have a law that sharply limits the possibilities of the kind of law you want; that law is the First Amendment.

wombatmobile 5y ago

> My better nature thinks that... I'm not sure what you mean by "better" or "nature". It sounds like you may have some form of structure in your thinking that clearly delineates "politics" from "business" and "morality". Can we explore that a little? Do you consider it is the role of SCOTUS to be the moral arbiter of women's bodies? If not, and SCOTUS has overreached, whose role is it to push back against SCOTUS' activism? Nobody? Everybody? Somebody? The answers to these questions are not mathematical, scientific, or technical. They are political. If your "better nature" excludes companies from participating in the political process, how does it feel about companies donating to political parties e.g. to facilitate the building of oil pipelines across exempt areas of land, or to rezone land for mega warehouses, or to bust unions, or to facilitate casinos?

christophilus 5y ago
Not then OP, but companies donating to political parties seems like a pretty obviously bad idea, and I wish we would ban it.
- threatofrain 5y ago
  At this point it's a US Constitutional matter. Nothing short of a Supreme Court shakeup or a Constitutional amendment would do anything.
salawat 5y ago
> Can we explore that a little? Many people do structure their thinking that way for the simple reason that business molds itself to it's container; the shape of which was previously defined by a combo of politics and technological feasibility. >Do you consider it is the role of SCOTUS to be the moral arbiter of women's bodies? No, but they are the legal one. Two different things there. >Who should push back? Citizens have duly elected representatives and Senators to sort that out. The continued conscious decision not to sort it out, is alas, a Hallmark of the carefully laid checks and balances of our system to keep the frivolous or overly controversial from getting rolled into the law of the land... Nope, couldn't keep a straight face. Intent is there though. >If your "better nature" excludes companies from participating in the political process, how does it feel about companies donating to political parties e.g. to facilitate the building of oil pipelines across exempt areas of land, or to rezone land for mega warehouses, or to bust unions, or to facilitate casinos? The political landscape is arguably better off without business being able to directly effect it via campaign donations/lobbying/writing bills. Business should inform. Not drive, politics. I also find companies making political donations at the behest of management to be suspect, especially since no one generally asks the laborer where the company should rout their political interest slush pile. Not that I was asked. Just had an answer in mind and figured I'd share.
SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
A political war of all against all massively raises the costs of expressing a viewpoint which other people don't like. That makes it harder to participate in the political process, and easier for the powers that be to discourage any political participating which they find inconvenient. (As a commenter says above though, I do think that in this particular case the takedown was probably not politically motivated.)

toomuchtodo 5y ago

(Reference to Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission removed here) Businesses have the right to do business with whom they choose, and if you choose to not host a site that was built to violate someone's rights, that is your choice. No one is entitled to a platform. Let the Texans receive snail mail reporting folks for attempting to exercise their rights, or others attempting to help them exercise their rights.

elmerfud 5y ago
Actually the LGBT cake you have a very big misunderstanding of what that was. The person was more than willing to sell them a cake because he did not discriminate in his business on who he sold his items. What the disagreement was on is he did not want to perform the artwork on the cake. What was upheld is you cannot enforce an artist to do work for you against their own opinions. This is a completely different thing. They were not asking GoDaddy to create their website or perform any task other than the hosting of it which is the selling of the cake. If GoDaddy chose not to create the website and instead referred them to other places for their creative work that would be the correct comparison. This is the lack of History that we seem to have in this country currently.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  I removed the example because it was a poor analogy. Regardless, a webhost or cloud provider is within their right to turn away anyone's business, including if it violates their Terms of Service (which is open to broad interpretation by the business). Can't discriminate against a protected class of course, but that's not the case here. The law, as it currently stands, cannot force a technology provider to provide a platform for content if they prefer not to host it.
  - elmerfud 5y ago
    The point is not about what the company is able to do legally. Because the legality of things is the lowest possible bar that we could set in our society. It's a really poor excuse to do something and say well it's not illegal. My point is this excessive moral arbitration that causes the exclusion of people and entities from society is a very dangerous path to head down. We should want individuals to make moral and political decisions and participate in the processes that allow for change and remediation. By having companies both large and small become the moral arbiters and forcibly excluding people from the participation in society will only ever end badly.

sithadmin 5y ago

This is really very cut and dry: GoDaddy's terms of service prohibit use of their services for harvesting PII without express consent from the person whose PII is being collected. The anti-abortion activists' site openly invites the public to doxx 3rd parties, and hence violates the policy. The anti-abortion site is not functionally that dissimilar from something like a site that allows doxxing ex-romatic partners or the like, and both represent low-value forms of distasteful speech that frankly, no private service provider ought to be obliged to faciliate. While GoDaddy could be politically or morally motivated here, this just seems like a fair application of the policy.

scarmig 5y ago
dontdatehimgirl.com is a website that indeed lets women dox exes, and its DNS provider is... GoDaddy. ETA: I agree that that TOS provision is good and should be enforced, but it's no coincidence who gets the hammer for violating it.
- sithadmin 5y ago
  The anti-abortion site is getting traffic, press coverage and activist attention in ways the site you mentioned (probably) doesn't. 'The nail that sticks out gets hammered down'. Even if the fairness in terms of TOS accountability here is in practice unfair, I think leaving issues to bubble up organically rather than implementing some sort of heavy-handed machine moderation/content monitor system (looking at you, YouTube) is probably preferable.
- France_is_bacon 5y ago
  It is impossible to monitor millions of websites, so I'm sure GoDaddy relies on people reporting the situation to them. Report dontdatehimgirl.com and see what happens. Post your results on here.
- 93po 5y ago
  It looks like the site you linked doesn't do that anymore. It's just a marketing site for a book as far as I can tell

dragonwriter 5y ago

> What we need is laws that companies cannot be moral arbiters. The thing is we have a law that sharply limits the possibilities of the kind of law you want; that law is the First Amendment.