When internet intermediaries like GoDaddy, Google, and CloudFlare bar neo-Nazis, dangerous precedent is set for silencing legitimate voices
In the wake of Charlottesville, both GoDaddy and Google have refused to manage the domain registration for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that …
Context & Ripple Effects
The sequence began when GoDaddy gave the Daily Stormer 24 hours to find a new registrar for violating its terms of service after the site posted an article mocking a Charlottesville victim. Within days Google canceled the domain and Zoho dropped its services, and the site responded by retreating to the dark web with an .onion address. EFF's piece is the counterweight argument: that private intermediaries making these calls case-by-case sets a precedent that can later be turned on legitimate speakers.
First-order effects
- GoDaddy, Google, Zoho, and CloudFlare have each refused service to the Daily Stormer, forcing the site off standard DNS and onto the dark web — the first time major registrars have coordinated this way against a single publication.
Second-order effects
- The enforcement is spreading beyond one site: GoDaddy later applied the same violence-related ToS logic to take down Richard Spencer's altright.com, while a 2019 investigation found 151 companies — including GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Google, and Amazon — still providing hosting, DNS, or CDN services to hate-speech sites, showing how uneven the new norm is.
Third-order effects
- Speech governance is migrating from platforms that publish content to the infrastructure layer beneath it — registrars, DNS, CDNs — where decisions happen under private terms of service rather than any consistent policy or process, which is precisely the arbitrariness EFF warns will eventually catch non-extremist voices.
The trend: Content moderation is moving upstream from social platforms to internet infrastructure providers, whose terms-of-service decisions are becoming de facto speech policy for the web.