The Daily Stormer is back online with free support from BitMitigate, whose founder says he believes in free speech, and wants to promote his company
The neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer was back online Friday with help from a small company whose founder said he wanted to defend free speech …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Daily Stormer's week of whack-a-mole continues: after GoDaddy gave it notice for violating its terms of service following the obscene post about the Charlottesville victim, the site briefly retreated to a .onion address on the dark web before surfacing again. Its protection gap opened when Cloudflare — which had publicly defended a hands-off, content-neutral policy under fire — reversed course, with CEO Matthew Prince explaining his discomfort with the about-face in an email to staff.
BitMitigate stepping in for free matters because it shows the exit ladder has more rungs than the big providers assumed: every time a major host or CDN drops the site, a smaller operator willing to absorb the reputational cost can pick it up, with the founder openly framing the move as both a free-speech stand and marketing for his company.
First-order effects
- BitMitigate now occupies exactly the DDoS-protection slot Cloudflare vacated when Prince halted protection for the site, giving the Daily Stormer a stable clearnet presence days after its domain provider cut it loose.
- Cloudflare's reversal no longer ends the site's access to protective infrastructure — it merely resets which company faces the public-pressure question next.
Second-order effects
- Other mainstream infrastructure firms watching this sequence — GoDaddy, Google, Cloudflare — can see that dropping a client shifts rather than settles the controversy, raising the stakes for coordinated policy versus piecemeal exits.
- BitMitigate's free-service model turns deplatforming into a customer-acquisition channel for small providers, but ties their brand to whatever content they inherit from larger companies' refusals.
Third-order effects
- If each ban simply routes sites down the provider size curve, content moderation at the infrastructure layer becomes a game of attrition that only succeeds when the smallest willing hosts are also reached — otherwise the ecosystem fragments into mainstream and fringe-tolerant tiers.
- The pattern pressures the industry toward either shared standards for refusing customers across domains, DNS, and DDoS protection, or an explicit acceptance that enforcement stops at each company's edge.
The trend: Infrastructure-level deplatforming is becoming a relay race, where each major provider's exit hands the site to progressively smaller operators until either the chain runs out or the industry coordinates.