The battle of domain registrars against the Daily Stormer website continues. As previously reported, this website, which is regarded in the US as a purveyor of ultra-nationalism and neo-Nazism, published a highly offensive article on the woman killed by a car driven into a crowd of demonstrators in the American city of Charlottesville. Soon after this the GoDaddy domain registrar that hosted the Daily Stormer refused to further host the website. Then Daily Stormer tried to move to Google Domains, but the corporation also refused to deal with the website and blocked its domain. The creators then moved the Daily Stormer to a mirror site in the dark web and even managed to register the Dailystormer.ru domain, but it was almost immediately suspended.
At last the creators of the neo-Nazi website successfully registered a new generic top-level .lol domain through the registrar Namecheap, as reported by Domain Name Wire. This was likely to be a calculated decision: Namecheap is known as a protector of free speech and a supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which defends civil liberties in the digital world. In fact, the EFF has spoken out against the actions of other domain registrars in the case of the Daily Stormer. In a public statement they said that they understand the position of the companies that refuse to host the Daily Stormer website, but they do not share it. The EFF has pointed out that defending freedom of speech must not mean defending only the views you share. The activists believe that these domain registrars had no sufficient legal grounds to refuse Daily Stormer as a client, and such refusal could set a precedent which later could be used against other websites, even ones promoting democratic values. In other words, the registrars, with the best of intentions, did not act according to the law but rather according to a “code”, which is unacceptable.
Nevertheless, Namecheap has also decided to refuse to host the Daily Stormer website, which was not an easy decision, said the company’s CEO Richard Kirkendall in his blog. He said that the material published on the Daily Stormer crosses a line and can foster violence even without directly inciting it, which is enough to refuse to deal with the website.
