Go Daddy Now Officially Opposes SOPA

You can now add Go Daddy’s name to the list of companies that actively oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act. In the space of a little more than a week, the company has gone from backing the controversial plan, to pulling its support in the face of fairly wide-spread customer outrage to, finally, official opposition.

Yesterday, Go Daddy’s new CEO Warren Adelman posted this short statement in Go Daddy’s forums:


Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.

Just two days earlier, Adelman, who recently took over as CEO for Go Daddy founder Bob Parsons, said it was pulling its SOPA support, explaining that stopping online piracy is of the “utmost importance.” He also admitted that the company had been working to help craft this legislation. Still, the company was clearly not ready to oppose. Adelman explained, “Go Daddy will support [SOPA] when and if the Internet community supports it.” The newly minted CEO might have thought that statement and not actively supporting SOPA would have been enough to quell the groundswell of protest and anti-Go Daddy sentiment. If so, he was wrong, and now the company says SOPA has “not fulfilled its basic requirement.”

It’s a rather stunning turn of events for Go Daddy, which is admittedly only one of 150 companies and organizations that reportedly support SOPA (the list includes Major League Baseball, Viacom, Time Warner and L’Oreal). Still, Go Daddy felt the heat in ways few others have. Though it has millions of customers, it saw tens of thousands leave it just two days. Those disgruntled partners were aided, in part, by host competitorswho offered instructions on how to move their domains and by a grass roots campaign begun on Reddit.com.

Now, though it’s not clear how Go Daddy’s SOPA opposition will manifest itself, the company has made a first step in what it hopes will be a road to customer relations repair.

So what do you think? Did Go Daddy do enough or is it too little, too late? Let us know in the comments.