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
This EFF op-ed lands three days into a fast-moving cascade: GoDaddy first told the Daily Stormer it violated its terms of service after the site posted an obscene article about the Charlottesville victim, Google then canceled the domain registration, and Zoho cut services too. By August 16 the site had retreated to the dark web with a .onion address — evicted from the open internet by private companies acting on their own terms, not by any court or law.
EFF's warning is that this eviction was decided by a handful of registrars and CDNs under no obligation to explain themselves, setting a template where infrastructure providers — not courts — decide who gets a domain at all.
First-order effects
- Daily Stormer loses its clearnet presence entirely, pushed onto Tor where reach depends on users deliberately seeking it out — an immediate collapse in casual discoverability.
- Every other registrar and CDN now faces public pressure to apply the same ToS reading, since refusing looks like endorsement once peers have acted.
Second-order effects
- GoDaddy applies the template beyond the original case, later taking down Richard Spencer's altright.com for 'encouraging and promoting violence' — showing one enforcement decision hardening into standing policy.
- Yet enforcement stays inconsistent: a 2019 investigation found 151 tech companies still offering hosting, DNS, or CDN services to hate-speech sites, meaning access increasingly depends on which provider a site can still find rather than any consistent rule.
Third-order effects
- Speech governance migrates from law to terms of service: a small set of infrastructure firms gains case-by-case power over what exists on the open web, with no appeal process, transparency requirement, or consistent standard across providers.
- Sites that expect eviction build around it — dark-web fallbacks and provider-shopping become standard practice, splitting the internet between companies that enforce and those that don't.
The trend: Domain registrars, DNS providers, and CDNs are becoming the de facto arbiters of online speech, enforcing content decisions through terms of service that vary company by company.