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In case you are not aware, SOPA is a bill under discussion in US Congress which aims to provide new censor mechanism for the internet. Through this bill, private companies and US governmental entities can censor websites they deem unfit. Nearly the entire internet community has fervently opposed the move. GoDaddy supported the move but that resulted in thousands of users transferring their domains away from GoDaddy. As a result, GoDaddy has now announced that it doesn’t support the bill.

SOPA has been under discussion in the entire internet community ever since it made it’s appearance in the US Congress in October. The Congress, with most of it’s members barely aware of how internet works and some having described it ridiculously in the past like ‘internets’ and ‘tubes’, has been severely criticized over this bill.

This violates individual freedom:
Most websites and tech entities have termed the bill as infringing on the individual rights. According to them, the bill allows US Justice department and certain private companies to control content on the internet. This way, they can censor any content that they dislike which will result in a kind of internet dictatorship.

GoDaddy is among the very few websites companies that have supported the bill. It’s name was included in a list circulated by the Congress in an attempt to show that it had support from internet-based companies. But as soon as the list became public, GoDaddy’s users started leaving the company and started shifting their domains to other domain-hosting services. Within a few hours, GoDaddy was in a for a huge business loss. And so, GoDaddy immediately withdrew it’s support from SOPA and started pleading customers not to leave saying that the support for bill was kind of a joke. Of course no one is buying into this logic. And this sends out a very strong message to everyone that the internet community, en masse, doesn’t want a ‘censorship board’ to sit over them and monitor all content because this will clearly take away the freedom and real spirit of using internet.

Image courtesy opensourceway.
[ttjad]