GoDaddy takes down Richard Spencer's website altright.com, says it has “encouraged and promoted violence in a direct and threatening manner”
Ryan Broderick / BuzzFeed :
Context & Ripple Effects
GoDaddy is repeating a playbook it ran nine months earlier, when it told the Daily Stormer it violated its terms of service after Charlottesville and gave the site days to find another registrar. Now Richard Spencer's altright.com gets the same treatment, with GoDaddy citing direct encouragement of violence rather than any legal finding.
The move lands amid an unresolved fight over who decides: the EFF has already warned that when intermediaries like GoDaddy, Google, and CloudFlare bar neo-Nazis, they set a precedent that can silence legitimate voices — and the later Gab and Texas Right to Life cases show the standard spreading well past the original targets.
First-order effects
- Altright.com loses its domain registration immediately and must find a new provider willing to host it, while Richard Spencer loses a primary publishing channel.
Second-order effects
- Other registrars now face the same choice GoDaddy did — accept reputational risk by hosting the site or follow suit — and the EFF's free-speech critique gives every future target a ready-made argument against arbitrary removal.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds from Daily Stormer through Gab to Texas Right to Life, domain and hosting providers become de facto speech arbiters whose terms-of-service judgments, not courts, determine which political movements stay online.
The trend: Internet infrastructure providers are consolidating into private censors, with each high-profile takedown widening the gap between what terms of service formally allow and what registrars will actually host.