GoDaddy tells neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer it violated its ToS and to find a new domain provider, after it posted an obscene article about Charlottesville victim
White supremacist site the Daily Stormer needs to find another domain provider after getting the boot from GoDaddy.
Context & Ripple Effects
GoDaddy's termination of the Daily Stormer is the first move in what became a rapid cascade: within a day, Google said it would cancel the site's domain registration and Zoho dropped its services, and by the next day the site had retreated to the dark web with an .onion address. The trigger was an obscene article mocking a Charlottesville victim, giving GoDaddy a ToS violation to point to rather than a naked content judgment.
The episode immediately drew a civil-liberties counterweight: the EFF argued that when intermediaries like GoDaddy, Google, and CloudFlare bar neo-Nazis, they set a dangerous precedent for silencing legitimate voices. That tension — enforcement against the indefensible versus arbitrary private power over speech — frames everything GoDaddy did afterward, including taking down Richard Spencer's altright.com and giving Gab.com 24 hours to leave.
First-order effects
- The Daily Stormer loses its domain registration at GoDaddy and must find another provider within GoDaddy's timeline, pushing it toward less mainstream infrastructure.
- GoDaddy establishes that it will enforce its terms of service against extremist content, not just technical violations — a shift from passive registrar to active arbiter.
Second-order effects
- Other intermediaries follow rather than absorb the displaced traffic: Google cancels the site's registration and Zoho cuts services, while CloudFlare's role comes under public scrutiny in the EFF debate.
- Every subsequent controversial site now faces a coordinated chokepoint problem — as Gab discovered when GoDaddy gave it 24 hours to vacate, and Spencer's altright.com when GoDaddy cited violent promotion.
Third-order effects
- Domain registrars and hosts are becoming de facto content moderators, with ToS language doing the work that law does not — exactly the private-censorship precedent the EFF warned would sweep up legitimate voices.
- Extremist publishers respond by migrating to censorship-resistant infrastructure like the dark web, splitting the open web into moderated platforms and unmoderated refuges.
The trend: Internet infrastructure providers are consolidating into the web's de facto speech regulators, enforcing terms of service where governments and platforms leave gaps.