4 ms·

While boycotting companies supporting SOPA is important, I feel the excessive focus on GoDaddy is distracting the community from the important issue of actually

• wh-uws 15y ago
  I think GoDaddy is just an easier target to make an example out of more than anything.
  • _delirium 15y ago
    Probably also interacts with a lot of pre-existing dislike of GoDaddy; they're not exactly a previously-loved company that just did something to anger people for the first time.
• mike-cardwell 15y ago
  What evidence do you have that the number of letters has been negatively affected by the GoDaddy coverage? This GoDaddy coverage has been perfect. If anything, more people know about SOPA than would have done otherwise. If anything, the number of letters being sent will have increased, not decreased.
  • sidww2 15y ago
    I don't mean to imply that the number of letters has decreased. But if the majority of the community chatter is about boycotting GoDaddy, then that will decrease the focus on other (much much much more important) parts of the campaign which could have a negative effect. For instance, people may think that they've done their part by boycotting GoDaddy. It also focusses attention only on SOPA when PIPA is almost as bad.
    • jczhang 15y ago
      There is a halo effect. Attention on SOPA increases attention on PIPA. Without the SOPA scandal, this halo effect and increased on attention on PIPA may never have happened. You can't simply convert emotion from one object to the other. I think it's better to support things that are in the same direction than to nitpick the details (eg. pick your battles).
• rhizome 15y ago
  Indeed. Beware that PIPA is going to be held up as the "reasonable compromise," which also sucks. http://www.firstpost.com/tech/microsoft-opposes-sopa-whilst-pipa-faces-filibuster-138683.html http://www.firstpost.com/tech/microsoft-opposes-sopa-whilst-...
• danilocampos 15y ago
  People, and movements, need victories. GoDaddy may not be anything close to the final blow against this nonsense, but that isn't important. Here's the thing: it's the week of Christmas. People, including elected officials and their constituents, are traveling and distracted. The likelihood of a letter-writing campaign either getting off the ground of making an impressive impact is much slimmer than usual. Meanwhile, a very particular company is identified as supportive of the legislation. It happens that their product is broadly used by the Internet community and that said product provides recurring revenue. The loss of numerous customers, as a result, has lasting impact. And so the community responds and makes an example of this company. Do angels sing, heralding the end of bad legislation? No. But tech news outlets, which would have had nothing substantial to print, now get to focus their full attention again on SOPA, on how a company who supports it is brutally punished, and how the Internet business community is maybe something not to be fucked with after all. So now this is part of the story: Internet folk have teeth, there are consequences for supporting bad law. The best part is that GoDaddy doesn't even have to be wounded in any real sense – the story is enough to change the tone of the conversation. This is mostly a war of perceptions, so it's good to make the bad guys look like scheming clowns. This strikes me as an incredible deal during an otherwise dead week. What would you have preferred in its place? How would the season impact such a proposal? > The overwhelming majority of the effort should be going to calling/sending (physical) letters to one's respective representatives, maybe setting up some sort of a fund to oppose SOPA/PIPA and support the OPEN act, urging tech companies like Google to spend more on lobbying (They can and should be spending more to lobby against the act), etc I'm sure you don't need me to point out the multitude of wonderful, free publishing platforms you're going to be able to use to make your case for just this course of action. Meanwhile, while you're putting that all together, let's see a little gratitude for the good luck of GoDaddy's incompetence and for the time and money spent by the many domain holders who made their point so clearly. This is gonna be hard. We, the people, are way outgunned in terms of cash and lobbying. We need every victory we can get to keep the logs rolling.
• tibbon 15y ago
  Putting pressure on one company indirectly puts pressure on many however. Other companies that see, "Oh shit, GoDaddy has had nearly 40,000 domains transferred and more bad PR than they can handle, maybe we shouldn't be supporting this. What if that shit hits the fan for us too?" Making an example out of one can't be a bad thing.
• nextparadigms 15y ago
  I think making an example out of Godaddy for companies who support SOPA, is a good way to get others to quit and deter them from supporting such bills in the future. The worse it gets for Godaddy (say it ends up causing it to go bankrupt as a long term effect) the more chilling the effect will be for everyone else.
• Helianthus 15y ago
  Your post advocates that we don't act on the grounds that we should act. Silly. Advocacy often falls into the trap of trying to act uniformly, as if there is only one appropriate action for an individual of a movement to take. One individual does not have the capacity to decide those battles which should be fought and those battles from which we should gracefully withdraw. This is, in fact, because every battle that we have the present capacity to fight ought be undertaken: Unless, of course, there is only one battle upon which the war depends. But this is not so currently; your own multitude of (in my experience, only marginally important) battlefields demonstrates this.
• gasull 15y ago
  Why do you think the OPEN act is good?