I am no fan of stormfront.org or any other racist organization, but this is not acceptable.
When a person registers a domain name, they become the owners of that domain name. It does not belong to the registrar they hired to procure it, and they are not "leasing" the name from the registrar. A lease would suggest that the registrar owned the domain name prior to registration, which is not the case. And if you extrapolate, it suggests that some entity owns all unclaimed domain names de-facto, which is also not the case.
When you purchase a domain name, that does not award the registrar the status of "Actual Owner" of that domain. They are providing a technical service, nothing more.
ICANN should probably get involved and punish Network Solutions for this action.
Network Solutions might be within their rights to choose to no longer 'host' the domain name themselves, but in that case they must be obligated to arrange for a transfer to a different registrar. What they are not allowed to do is simply steal the domain name from it's actual owner because they disagree with the content of the owner's website, thus preventing a transfer.
It is important that we do not allow corporations to steal control or property from the open internet by using these politically charged circumstances as their theater of operation.
You own the name; the service of actually pointing that name to some nameservers, and maintaining secure control over it, is what you're paying for.
I could see a registrar telling you they don't want to do business with you any more; they should have to give you some time to transfer it out. However, it's still a dangerous precedent that people on all sides of the political spectrum would do well to heed as a warning of censorship to come.
> If that were the case, letting it expire would result in it just being dead rather than available for others to register.
No, it was always intended that when someone no longer needs a domain name, it would be returned to the pool of available domain names for others to make use of. This is in the very spirit of the internet.
What do you mean, "it was always intended?" That's certainly not how property rights work. If I legally own something, it doesn't become available to others just because I don't need it myself anymore.
I mean the internet is a new world which is only about 40 years old. It was created by a lot of really smart guys who mostly don't care about the "traditional market rules" and it was created a specific way to follow specific philosophies one of which is when a domain name is no longer being used it should be available for other people to purchase.
It's not exactly counter-culture, but it's completely different. The distributed infastructure, the emphasis on putting equal power in the hands of the smallest operators rather than focusing it on the largest corporations, none of these things mesh with how the offline world has been operating for centuries.
People who were aware of the internet before it was cool remember these details.
I don't know how to make it more clear for you than that.
I'm aware of the philosophies behind the creation of the Internet. I'm just telling you the system you're describing is mutually exclusive with one in which domains are owned by people who register them.
I absolutely agree there are some loose ends. That's why there were a lot of court cases about 10-15 years ago, mostly spearheaded by large corporations who were late to the game and suddenly realized they needed to protect their trademarks in the domain name market.
It's safe to say that it has not been settled yet. But it is in everyone's best interest to do our best to adhere to the intentions of the original creators.
This is a good point, but I think you could still make the case that you own it. Is the yearly registration fee analagous to a subscription, or to property taxes?
I don't have the answer here; curious to find out what everyone thinks.
You aren't "re-up"ing. Domain names are not pre-paid cell phone plans.
Look at it this way. Until a domain is registered, nobody owns it. When you pay to register a domain, you aren't buying it on the registrar's behalf.
When you register a domain name you are purchasing that domain name for the duration of the registration period. You own it. Period.
The registrar's role is to handle certain technical functions such as providing PTR service, WHOIS records, and to expire the domain when the registration period expires. They don't own it, and the cost of registration is meant to cover their operating costs.
This is also why domains are so cheap. A .com is about $10 per year. That's basically nothing, when you compare to other things you pay for. If there weren't a recurring fee, people would never give up their unused domain names.
ICANN could in theory revoke the ability of the registrar to operate. Meaning that they could be put out of business pretty easily. That said I doubt that ICANN would actually do this on a first offense kind of thing. ICANN can also forcibly take the domain from the current registrar and cause a transfer to someone else instead. I think that is what will likely happen if NS doesn't get rid of the parking/stealing of the domain.
ought to work, but it doesn't. It gets stuck at Cloudflare's NGINX server.
It's still available on the Internet Archive.[1] Runs vBulletin, so the posts didn't get archived, just the titles.
Stormfront has been around for decades, getting little traction. It's partly David Duke's site, or was. Now it's just a forum. It's about as nutty as the usual white militia crowd, with which there's some overlap. Compare "vdare.com", which is somewhat white supremacist and pro-Trump. There's a whole spectrum of groups like that.
This was a bad decision by Network Solutions. If registrars start censoring everybody the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center don't like, they're going to run head-on into the Trump supporters. That won't end well.
> This was a bad decision by Network Solutions. If registrars start censoring everybody the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center don't like, they're going to run head-on into the Trump supporters. That won't end well.
I agree that it was a bad decision, however I think it's going to be revealed that the decision has more to do with the connections to violence that the forum apparently had, rather than the "speech" content.
Still, they (NS) are going to have to work really hard to convince people that they didn't just make a power grab.
In this case, I believe, technically, the domain "belonged" to the domain registrar. Why? Because the registrant used the registrar's privacy protection.
While private domain registrations seem like a mildly useful privacy tool, factors to consider is that you are no longer the “owner” or your domain name (ICANN defines who owns the domain by what is published in WHOIS), and also that you no longer have any rights unless you sue the registrar.
From what I understand, because the contact information pointed at Network Solutions' privacy protection service, there's no official "record" of ownership pointing to anyone else. So the domain ownership is in limbo since Network Solutions can't (or won't) verify the actual owner.
I think this also brings up the question of how much control registrars have over a "purchased" domain. Am I buying that domain? Or am I buying the ability to tell the registrar what to do with it?
You never own the domain. You register it for a period of time, subject to terms of an agreement. I'm almost certain of that, unless something has changed recently. I'm surprised so many on HN seem unaware of it.
If you use privacy protection, you are not the registrant; the privacy protection vendor is. That's what I've read in agreements with the privacy vendors, and that's what the whois record says.
> You never own the domain. You register it for a period of time
No, that's not what's happening.
When you register a domain you are purchasing it. The fees you pay are to cover the operations of the registrar, who are providing a public service. It is also to allow people to pick up dropped domains that nobody is using anymore. This system was never intended to be abused the way it is being abused today.
Regardless of how the rules are presently defined, that would _never_ stand up in court. And I think it's a waste of time for us to squabble over nonsense that every rational thinking person knows is nonsense.
It's important to remember and consider the reason that registrars exist and the reason ICANN was created. All of these things are meant to protect the sanity of internet operations, not to contribute to their corruption and breakdown.
> Regardless of how the rules are presently defined, that would _never_ stand up in court
IANAL, but I agree. When you sign up for privacy protection, you're hiring the registrar to act as your agent. If they then act outside their granted authority as such, then they're doing so in breach of contract. I believe that's called 'conversion'.
I really don't like this kind of rationalization for censorship on technicalities.
Technically correct may matter legally, but we should make it clear that it is not acceptable for companies like Network Solutions or Facebook to engage in this behavior. If the law does not protect speech in these instances, we should push back using other means.
It's simply not reasonable to expect non-technical, non-lawyers to understand these nuances well enough to get their message out without risking censorship. Today, that's OK because we're talking about a very bad message, but tomorrow it may not be quite so OK.
Censorship is fine. Use it as a tool to maintain social order.
Don't be the guy that read 1984 and thinks all censorship is bad, and that the world is going to collapse because someone banned a neo-nazi forum. You don't have enough information to make that far-reaching slippery-slope conclusion, mostly because of the millions of other factors that you didn't consider in your model.
We need to encourage companies that engage in this behavior that censor violent people.
> When a person registers a domain name, they become the owners of that domain name.
They may own the name such that it would be improper to allow someone else to register it, but there entitlement to service from the registrar is based on the terms of the contract they have signed.
> ICANN should probably get involved and punish Network Solutions for this action.
What specific ICANN policy has been violated?
> Network Solutions might be within their rights to choose to no longer 'host' the domain name themselves, but in that case they must be obligated to arrange for a transfer to a different registrar.
They are obligated to process a transfer at the request of the owner and new registrar, subject to certain timing and other rules. They are not, AFAICT, required to arrange such a transfer proactively.
I'm not going to dig through their books, I don't have the time and that's a job for lawyers. But I was around when ICANN was created and I know what their job is, and preventing these kinds of abuses by registrars is right at the top of their priority list.
> They are obligated to process a transfer at the request of the owner and new registrar, subject to certain timing and other rules. They are not, AFAICT, required to arrange such a transfer proactively.
That isn't what I meant. I only meant that if they were going to refuse to perform their duties as a registrar for one particular customer then they should provide that customer a means to switch registrars.
What they did instead is a kind of theft, regardless of how you feel about that particular customer. (not a fan, myself, as I've stated).
Ugh, I don’t have a problem with saying that you no longer want to broadcast details, but I don’t think you should get to park.
I say this with a wife that they actively advocate murdering (it’s weird that everyone focuses just on the white supremacy and not the literal “we must kill the Jews” horror).
So as much as I hate them and all those people that wish that the USA (and England, etc) lost ww2 I still don’t think you get to take over their domain.
That's an important observation. If people were free to read their website, it wouldn't be easy to forget how repugnant they are. People are starting to forget the past because it's being censored. And when we forget the past, we repeat it.
Stormfront helped organize and promote an event in Charlottesville, Virginia that saw a man they radicalized use his car as a weapon injuring 35 people and killing Heather Heyer. Let’s play the video of that, juxtaposed with their editor’s comments supporting it, on loop at their newly parked domain.
That accomplishes the goal of demonstrating how repugnant their ideas are without a company having to give them a platform to radicalize more people.
Sam Hyde is currently facing an International Court of Justice war crimes tribunal on the charges of being a Tired Unfunny-Ass Meme. No one should underrate the danger of this washed up pathetic villain.
Of course, there's a small but non-zero percentage of the population that endorses, supports, and embraces those views. Showing the driver acting out those views isn't going to drive off those supporters.
I have an Israeli friend who's now thinking of relocating back to Israel--her synagogue gets regular threats right now (it didn't used to), and someone hung a banner reading "JEWS DID 9/11" on a freeway overpass near from her house recently (she lives in a heavily Jewish neighborhood, the placement was intentional).
Where are you going to stop... will you turn off all the Berkeley Antifa domains also (whatever they are), since they directly radicalized Eric Clanton and his 7 assaults with a deadly weapon in 1 day, four of which he is currently charged with?
Or is 4 counts of assault with a deadly weapon not enough, and the bar should be set at say, 10?
Or is only murder, justification? What if Fields pleads to criminal negligence causing death, a lesser charge - will you give stormfront back their domain?
That’s not relevant to my point - these are awful people, but they should be free to state their beliefs. They shouldn’t be free to act on them.
More importantly: it’s much better for everyone if we know who they are. I’d certainly feel better if I knew who was a direct risk for my wife.
Honestly I wish there was a site that just enumerates Nazis in America. But at the same time I’d be worried about the converse: a site the tracks “antifa”. There are some awful people who would fall under the strict “member of antifa gang” style semantic, but the Nazis are labeling all non-Nazis as antifa. Given there’s at the very least a white supremicist as president I’d be concerned about giving carte Blanche privilege to label people like this.
Everything is awful. I fucking hate those asshole “trump is better than Hilary because I don’t research anything other than some nd bite” people that put us in this position
The problems in these people's lives, that caused them to turn to hate and aggression, will not be solved attempting to excommunicate them. In fact, I suspect it will exacerbate them.
I disagree. Having a place to go where likeminded people encourage you to do bad shit isn't a good thing. Stormfront was an echo-chamber of hate that normalised their members evil thoughts and actions.
If you think it's an echo chamber now then wait until they have their own video streaming sites, twitter clones, etc.
Then wait for people who are conservatives, alt-righters, or anyone else that's no longer PC enough to start sharing these spaces because they've been chased off mainstream sites. It's the best recruitment tool stormfront could hope for.
I'm not sure what your point is. Stormfront was their home base.
> Then wait for people who are conservatives, alt-righters, or anyone else that's no longer PC enough to start sharing these spaces because they've been chased off mainstream sites.
That's what just happened. They were chased off all mainstream sites and could only spew their hatred on SF. Then that got taken away from them.
Stormfront was somebody's home base but not everyone's or even significant fraction of so-called "alt-right". In terms you hopefully understand it is as same as saying slashdot is the home base of "computer geeks".
Sounds about right. Registrars have been taking down jihadist forums for a very long time merely for discussing violence; white nationalists must have realized they were living on borrowed time.
The article makes it sound like the Southern Poverty Law Center's findings were key in Network Solutions' decision. I wonder if the same will apply to other groups the SPLC tracks as hate groups. The Nation of Islam's domain remains with Network Solutions.
I've always considered extremists as "canaries" --- you may not agree with any of their views, but their existence serves as a "buffer" of sorts, to show where the current boundaries are. Thus, when they disappear, what is next considered extremist will gradually edge closer to normalcy.
In denouncing racism and other forms of extremism, we have to be careful not to turn society into a heavily normalised monoculture that, ironically, many of these extremist groups are themselves proponents of.
taking away their domain names doesn't eliminate racism. all those stormfront folks are just as racist as they were yesterday. and now it is harder to keep an eye on them.
Yes, absolutely we should try to eliminate racism and society would be better off in every way. But there are many methods to eliminate racism. Do we want to persecute them and turn them into martyrs? Or do we want to educate them and change their minds?
Yes, it would, but the way to get rid of racism isn't to take down the websites of racists.
OP is right, racist websites can be viewed a lot like a canary in a coalmine. That this canary has been killed implies the air might be getting unsafe to breathe.
Ehh, I mean it's good to be aware of things like this, but I see them more as the people who ruin things for everyone. Because of one foiled plot where a group tried to fly with liquid explosives[1], nobody is ever allowed to carry liquids through security onto planes. Because one person tried to detonate explosives in their shoes on a plane, we have to take off shoes in security[2]. I don't think either of those changes got us measurably close to flying "securely" but it make countless people miss flights, even more miserable, and encourage copycats.
This is nonsense. The only way to "be careful denouncing them" is to tolerate them. How much extremist behavior would you tolerate before denouncing or taking action? You present no measure and you've said nothing worth taking into account. At all.
> How much extremist behavior would you tolerate before denouncing
In the United States, extremist groups have enjoyed the right to speak in public for decades and it almost never turns into violence. Violence is so rare at those rallies that it makes big news when it happens, such as we saw recently in Charlottesville.
We value our right to free speech so much that we tolerate people spouting hateful garbage, as long as speech is all they're doing. It's really a great sight to see the two sides shouting at each other in peace.
I've no interest in, or support for, Stormfront, its members or its message but I absolutely do not support this and other recent actions from members of our industry.
The constant censorship and de-platforming is one thing, the support from otherwise intelligent and rational people (such as those on HN) for these actions is another, and vastly more worrying, thing entirely.
It's unfortunate to see society rapidly devolving to a far more basic, ignorance driven tribal culture driven by identity politics.
Time to go down to the Winchester, have a pint and wait for this all to blow over from a safe distance.
It would be tragic if, as the rest of society has ignored the issue for years, privacy tech gets its next real foothold with hate groups.
It would be far more tragic if the general public started associating privacy tech with hate groups, if using Tor became akin to wearing a pointed white hood.
If this stands as-is, it could set a precedent enabling registrars to hijack domains, which is frightening.
Netsol absolutely has the right to no longer provide them DNS and/or registration, but they cannot simply place the domain on hold indefinitely due to their own capriciousness.
How is it acceptable to let a corporation arbitrarily decide, after taking your money, that they no longer wish to provide you with that service AND block your ability to use what you paid for?
I lost a domain I owned for 17 years because I was unemployed when renewal came up and missed the email.
My sympathies for storefront are not strong. Domains are no more concrete than a street address you don't own it. The sooner you realize this the better. If you have a better system, present it.
Registrars could give a fuck about you. You are a monetary item. If you don't produce they will find a way to make your domain produce.
This is encouraging and a step in the right direction.
We've let the internet become the a terrifying hate indoctrination tool and this is just the tip of the iceberg. It took a person driving through a crowd of protesters to wake people up. Racist thoughts are common as a function of biology, in regular society we have checks against it growing to insidious levels. Online it's been open season for the hate groups to take advantage of modern marketing tactics to recruit and spread hate with alarming efficiency leading to violence.
I question the reasoning for changing the 'title' of this submission. The article title which is what it was altered to match, is vague. The actual meat of the story is the action that Network Solutions took. The heading now is unclear, who shut it down? Was it the host? The registrar?
How does changing the title from a detailed summary to something vague and politically charged benefit the HN community or the dissemination of worthwhile information.
The original title was, approximately, "Network Solutions disables and parks the stormfront.org domain".
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadWhen a person registers a domain name, they become the owners of that domain name. It does not belong to the registrar they hired to procure it, and they are not "leasing" the name from the registrar. A lease would suggest that the registrar owned the domain name prior to registration, which is not the case. And if you extrapolate, it suggests that some entity owns all unclaimed domain names de-facto, which is also not the case.
When you purchase a domain name, that does not award the registrar the status of "Actual Owner" of that domain. They are providing a technical service, nothing more.
ICANN should probably get involved and punish Network Solutions for this action.
Network Solutions might be within their rights to choose to no longer 'host' the domain name themselves, but in that case they must be obligated to arrange for a transfer to a different registrar. What they are not allowed to do is simply steal the domain name from it's actual owner because they disagree with the content of the owner's website, thus preventing a transfer.
It is important that we do not allow corporations to steal control or property from the open internet by using these politically charged circumstances as their theater of operation.
I could see a registrar telling you they don't want to do business with you any more; they should have to give you some time to transfer it out. However, it's still a dangerous precedent that people on all sides of the political spectrum would do well to heed as a warning of censorship to come.
If that were the case, letting it expire would result in it just being dead rather than available for others to register.
No, it was always intended that when someone no longer needs a domain name, it would be returned to the pool of available domain names for others to make use of. This is in the very spirit of the internet.
I mean the internet is a new world which is only about 40 years old. It was created by a lot of really smart guys who mostly don't care about the "traditional market rules" and it was created a specific way to follow specific philosophies one of which is when a domain name is no longer being used it should be available for other people to purchase.
It's not exactly counter-culture, but it's completely different. The distributed infastructure, the emphasis on putting equal power in the hands of the smallest operators rather than focusing it on the largest corporations, none of these things mesh with how the offline world has been operating for centuries.
People who were aware of the internet before it was cool remember these details.
I don't know how to make it more clear for you than that.
It's safe to say that it has not been settled yet. But it is in everyone's best interest to do our best to adhere to the intentions of the original creators.
I don't have the answer here; curious to find out what everyone thinks.
Look at it this way. Until a domain is registered, nobody owns it. When you pay to register a domain, you aren't buying it on the registrar's behalf.
When you register a domain name you are purchasing that domain name for the duration of the registration period. You own it. Period.
The registrar's role is to handle certain technical functions such as providing PTR service, WHOIS records, and to expire the domain when the registration period expires. They don't own it, and the cost of registration is meant to cover their operating costs.
This is also why domains are so cheap. A .com is about $10 per year. That's basically nothing, when you compare to other things you pay for. If there weren't a recurring fee, people would never give up their unused domain names.
And they don't have to provide DNS services to neo-Nazis.
Cloudflare rejects IP-only requests. The IP address is 104.20.30.134, but using that in the browser address bar won't work.
ought to work, but it doesn't. It gets stuck at Cloudflare's NGINX server.It's still available on the Internet Archive.[1] Runs vBulletin, so the posts didn't get archived, just the titles.
Stormfront has been around for decades, getting little traction. It's partly David Duke's site, or was. Now it's just a forum. It's about as nutty as the usual white militia crowd, with which there's some overlap. Compare "vdare.com", which is somewhat white supremacist and pro-Trump. There's a whole spectrum of groups like that.
This was a bad decision by Network Solutions. If registrars start censoring everybody the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center don't like, they're going to run head-on into the Trump supporters. That won't end well.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170818020428/stormfront.org/fo...
I'm actually surprised it works, because I thought headers need a space after the colon.
Changing the host header to www.stormfrom.org gets me html.
I agree that it was a bad decision, however I think it's going to be revealed that the decision has more to do with the connections to violence that the forum apparently had, rather than the "speech" content.
Still, they (NS) are going to have to work really hard to convince people that they didn't just make a power grab.
While private domain registrations seem like a mildly useful privacy tool, factors to consider is that you are no longer the “owner” or your domain name (ICANN defines who owns the domain by what is published in WHOIS), and also that you no longer have any rights unless you sue the registrar.
I think this also brings up the question of how much control registrars have over a "purchased" domain. Am I buying that domain? Or am I buying the ability to tell the registrar what to do with it?
You never own the domain. You register it for a period of time, subject to terms of an agreement. I'm almost certain of that, unless something has changed recently. I'm surprised so many on HN seem unaware of it.
If you use privacy protection, you are not the registrant; the privacy protection vendor is. That's what I've read in agreements with the privacy vendors, and that's what the whois record says.
No, that's not what's happening.
When you register a domain you are purchasing it. The fees you pay are to cover the operations of the registrar, who are providing a public service. It is also to allow people to pick up dropped domains that nobody is using anymore. This system was never intended to be abused the way it is being abused today.
It's important to remember and consider the reason that registrars exist and the reason ICANN was created. All of these things are meant to protect the sanity of internet operations, not to contribute to their corruption and breakdown.
IANAL, but I agree. When you sign up for privacy protection, you're hiring the registrar to act as your agent. If they then act outside their granted authority as such, then they're doing so in breach of contract. I believe that's called 'conversion'.
Technically correct may matter legally, but we should make it clear that it is not acceptable for companies like Network Solutions or Facebook to engage in this behavior. If the law does not protect speech in these instances, we should push back using other means.
It's simply not reasonable to expect non-technical, non-lawyers to understand these nuances well enough to get their message out without risking censorship. Today, that's OK because we're talking about a very bad message, but tomorrow it may not be quite so OK.
Don't be the guy that read 1984 and thinks all censorship is bad, and that the world is going to collapse because someone banned a neo-nazi forum. You don't have enough information to make that far-reaching slippery-slope conclusion, mostly because of the millions of other factors that you didn't consider in your model.
We need to encourage companies that engage in this behavior that censor violent people.
They may own the name such that it would be improper to allow someone else to register it, but there entitlement to service from the registrar is based on the terms of the contract they have signed.
> ICANN should probably get involved and punish Network Solutions for this action.
What specific ICANN policy has been violated?
> Network Solutions might be within their rights to choose to no longer 'host' the domain name themselves, but in that case they must be obligated to arrange for a transfer to a different registrar.
They are obligated to process a transfer at the request of the owner and new registrar, subject to certain timing and other rules. They are not, AFAICT, required to arrange such a transfer proactively.
I'm not going to dig through their books, I don't have the time and that's a job for lawyers. But I was around when ICANN was created and I know what their job is, and preventing these kinds of abuses by registrars is right at the top of their priority list.
> They are obligated to process a transfer at the request of the owner and new registrar, subject to certain timing and other rules. They are not, AFAICT, required to arrange such a transfer proactively.
That isn't what I meant. I only meant that if they were going to refuse to perform their duties as a registrar for one particular customer then they should provide that customer a means to switch registrars.
What they did instead is a kind of theft, regardless of how you feel about that particular customer. (not a fan, myself, as I've stated).
I say this with a wife that they actively advocate murdering (it’s weird that everyone focuses just on the white supremacy and not the literal “we must kill the Jews” horror).
So as much as I hate them and all those people that wish that the USA (and England, etc) lost ww2 I still don’t think you get to take over their domain.
That accomplishes the goal of demonstrating how repugnant their ideas are without a company having to give them a platform to radicalize more people.
I have an Israeli friend who's now thinking of relocating back to Israel--her synagogue gets regular threats right now (it didn't used to), and someone hung a banner reading "JEWS DID 9/11" on a freeway overpass near from her house recently (she lives in a heavily Jewish neighborhood, the placement was intentional).
Good on them for shutting down Stormfront.
Where are you going to stop... will you turn off all the Berkeley Antifa domains also (whatever they are), since they directly radicalized Eric Clanton and his 7 assaults with a deadly weapon in 1 day, four of which he is currently charged with?
Or is 4 counts of assault with a deadly weapon not enough, and the bar should be set at say, 10?
Or is only murder, justification? What if Fields pleads to criminal negligence causing death, a lesser charge - will you give stormfront back their domain?
More importantly: it’s much better for everyone if we know who they are. I’d certainly feel better if I knew who was a direct risk for my wife.
Honestly I wish there was a site that just enumerates Nazis in America. But at the same time I’d be worried about the converse: a site the tracks “antifa”. There are some awful people who would fall under the strict “member of antifa gang” style semantic, but the Nazis are labeling all non-Nazis as antifa. Given there’s at the very least a white supremicist as president I’d be concerned about giving carte Blanche privilege to label people like this.
Everything is awful. I fucking hate those asshole “trump is better than Hilary because I don’t research anything other than some nd bite” people that put us in this position
Then wait for people who are conservatives, alt-righters, or anyone else that's no longer PC enough to start sharing these spaces because they've been chased off mainstream sites. It's the best recruitment tool stormfront could hope for.
> Then wait for people who are conservatives, alt-righters, or anyone else that's no longer PC enough to start sharing these spaces because they've been chased off mainstream sites.
That's what just happened. They were chased off all mainstream sites and could only spew their hatred on SF. Then that got taken away from them.
The article makes it sound like the Southern Poverty Law Center's findings were key in Network Solutions' decision. I wonder if the same will apply to other groups the SPLC tracks as hate groups. The Nation of Islam's domain remains with Network Solutions.
In denouncing racism and other forms of extremism, we have to be careful not to turn society into a heavily normalised monoculture that, ironically, many of these extremist groups are themselves proponents of.
Eliminating racism doesn't turn society into a monoculture--it permits lots of different cultures to coexist without threat of violence.
The world would be better off in every way without racism (except for those who directly benefit from racism--but fuck those guys.)
OP is right, racist websites can be viewed a lot like a canary in a coalmine. That this canary has been killed implies the air might be getting unsafe to breathe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid
In the United States, extremist groups have enjoyed the right to speak in public for decades and it almost never turns into violence. Violence is so rare at those rallies that it makes big news when it happens, such as we saw recently in Charlottesville.
We value our right to free speech so much that we tolerate people spouting hateful garbage, as long as speech is all they're doing. It's really a great sight to see the two sides shouting at each other in peace.
This is a really great analogy, it also shows when big brother is starting to over-reach it's authority.
The constant censorship and de-platforming is one thing, the support from otherwise intelligent and rational people (such as those on HN) for these actions is another, and vastly more worrying, thing entirely.
It's unfortunate to see society rapidly devolving to a far more basic, ignorance driven tribal culture driven by identity politics.
Time to go down to the Winchester, have a pint and wait for this all to blow over from a safe distance.
Web 2.0 will become a stale walled garden with increasingly throttled traffic. OTOH, Web 3.0 will flourish.
It sets a bad precedent IMO, but the positive aspect is Web 2.0 will soon be dead.
Bring on Web 3.0, a decentralized, censorship-resistant platform.
It would be far more tragic if the general public started associating privacy tech with hate groups, if using Tor became akin to wearing a pointed white hood.
Netsol absolutely has the right to no longer provide them DNS and/or registration, but they cannot simply place the domain on hold indefinitely due to their own capriciousness.
How is it acceptable to let a corporation arbitrarily decide, after taking your money, that they no longer wish to provide you with that service AND block your ability to use what you paid for?
My sympathies for storefront are not strong. Domains are no more concrete than a street address you don't own it. The sooner you realize this the better. If you have a better system, present it.
Registrars could give a fuck about you. You are a monetary item. If you don't produce they will find a way to make your domain produce.
We've let the internet become the a terrifying hate indoctrination tool and this is just the tip of the iceberg. It took a person driving through a crowd of protesters to wake people up. Racist thoughts are common as a function of biology, in regular society we have checks against it growing to insidious levels. Online it's been open season for the hate groups to take advantage of modern marketing tactics to recruit and spread hate with alarming efficiency leading to violence.
How does changing the title from a detailed summary to something vague and politically charged benefit the HN community or the dissemination of worthwhile information.
The original title was, approximately, "Network Solutions disables and parks the stormfront.org domain".