Move your domain, support EFF

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…of course, my domain is currently with sonic.net, who is awesome, so I won’t move. But, were I with The Company That Should Not Be Named…

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I will 2nd Sonic.net they are AWESOME. I have their fusion service.
And that company that shall not be named really made it hard to get off of them.

The other option that doesn’t require you to mess around with your DNS and give some random company a blip on their sales numbers is to visit the EFF’s donation web page and give them the cash directly.

If you want, they’ll even give you stickers for it and everyone loves stickers.

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Stickers are cool, but the HAT is really cool.

@spocko, can you say what happened in 2007? (Maybe none of my business.)

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I’m already with NameCheap. I switched over to them when the SOPA/GoDaddy fiasco happened.

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Namecheap isn’t such a random company. A recent report puts Namecheap as the 9th largest registrar.

You should read a bit about them…or, in full transparency, us. I joined the Namecheap team in 2009 but had my domains at Namecheap since 2005.

Thanks for asking. Here is a link to some of the EFF stories around this issue.

  • I was posting audio clips from a radio station owned by ABC Radio which was owned by Disney.
  • The audio clips were of the horrific things that the radio hosts were saying over the broadcast radio.

I wrote to the advertisers of this show and said, "These are the horrible things they are saying before or after your ads. They are tainting your brand. Do you want to continue supporting them? "

The radio station ( K S F O) sent a cease and desist letter to my web host (1&1 hosting) who told me to take down the audio clips because they were a copyright violation. I actually DID, but they still shut down my ENTIRE BLOG (text and all)

The C&D from ABC/Disney also threatened further legal action.

The EFF offered to defend me in court. They also pointed out to the ABC/Disney lawyers that everything that I was doing fell into the fair use category and they didn’t have case.

My defenders across the internet and world mirrored the audio clips and also wrote to more advertisers to ask them “Do you want to be associated with these people?”
I have records of 33 advertisers who left plus dozens of others who just quietly pulled their ads.

I had to find a new host who wouldn’t roll over when they saw legal letter head from an media company. I use ctyme.com run by a former EFF staffer.

Eventually ABC/Disney backed down, they didn’t pursue further legal action (although then never apologized and 1&1 never put my site back up).

In the process I accomplished a number of things

  1. Educated people on copyright and fair use.
  2. Spotlighted the violent rhetoric and bigotry of the radio hosts
  3. Gave people a method to push back on this kind of rhetoric without calling for
    censorship or firing of the hosts. I told the advertisers. “By choosing to not support these hosts you are not impinging on their speech, they can continue to say what they want only without your financial support.” (Two hosts were eventually let go because of the financial hit to the station and their inability to reign in their violent rhetoric and bigotry which advertisers did not want to be associated with.)

I then went on to teach these ideas and methods to multiple other groups that have used them effectively on Michael Savage, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Here is a link of me questioning Rupert Murdoch on how long he will be subsidizing a money losing Glenn Beck)

(Rupert and Me: I question the NewsCorp CEO about Subsidizing Glenn Beck)

When I started this in 2004 we didn’t have Facebook and Twitter, the development of those two social media platforms allows the campaigns to get much bigger.

In 2012, the SF Chronicle wrote a story about how I pioneered this and the impact it has had on RW media.

Thanks for asking,
LLAP,
Spocko
@spockosbrain is my twitter handle and spockosbrain.com is my blog.

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done! and i don’t mean to brag about the size of my wallet, but it was a lot more than the 50c from namecheap. cha-ching.

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Done, although some domains may require some additional finagling to process all the way through. I see that we crossed the 20k mark somewhere in there.

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Very cool, thanks for filling me in. It’s nice the see the good guys winning.

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I will not be supporting namecheap until they support DNSSEC. I wish EFF would urge them to do so.

I wish this had had better advance publicity. I saw the info briefly on the day it was offered. No time to move/contribute. EFF Fail on this one.

Hey lakelady - for what it’s worth, we do this annually. (We did it in Dec 2011, January 2013, and February 2014). In short, it will happen again in 2015. I’d strongly advise that you follow us on Twitter/Facebook if you’d like to be alerted to the next time it happens just in case it’s not published via an avenue you do normally follow. Thanks!

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