Think carefully: all six have come out in opposition to the bill, which would put tight restrictions on Internet firms in an effort to enforce U.S. copyright laws (although some firms took more convincing stands than others). At least two of the companies, Google and Amazon, have said they may go dark to protest the bill.

If you guessed GoDaddy, which had a public dust up after initially supporting SOPA, you're right. Sort of. GoDaddy's PAC leads in percentage, giving 52.9% of the $38,750 it has given during this election cycle to Representatives that have signed on to co-sponsor SOPA and Senators who are co-sponsoring PIPA.

• Microsoft $88,500 (20.9%)
• eBay $32,750 (35.5%)
• Google $29,000 (47.5%)
• GoDaddy $20,500 (52.9%)
• Yahoo! $11,000 (35.5%)
• Amazon $4,000 (42.1%)

We contacted all six companies asking for comment and requested they get back to us by 3 pm ET/noon PT on Thursday. All of the companies missed that deadline, but we'll update if any of them get back to us.

ReadWriteWeb analyzed Federal Election Commission data maintained by OpenSecret.org. While the reports are for the current election cycle, they do not list the dates of individual donations, making it hard to determine if the donations were made before or after a lawmaker signed on to co-sponsor the bills.

SOPA, and its Senate counerpart, PIPA, would force search engines and websites to block links to sites that are listed as being "dedicated" to copyright infringement. SOPA has been widely endorsed by traditional media companies, but Web firms and free speech advocates have likened it to government-enforced censorship.

Outspoken Supporters Received PAC Money

All of the donations were made in the 2012 election cycle, and individual donations ranged from $1,000 to a high of $10,000 given to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. by Microsoft. Only two SOPA/PIPA sponsoring lawmakers received donations from all six company PACs: Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.

Hatch, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee that unanimously approved PIPA in May, has been a long-time backer of the bill and its earlier versions.

"Fake pharmaceuticals threaten people's lives. Stolen movies, music and other products put many out of work," Hatch said in a statement posted on his Web site in May. "This is why protecting property rights is a critical imperative and is why we've come together in introducing this common-sense bill."

Goodlatte, meanwhile, made comments supporting SOPA as early as April, but didn't sign on as a co-sponsor until October.

"It is tempting to think of crimes involving counterfeiting and piracy, or intellectual property (IP) theft, as victimless, but this is simply untrue," he said a day after signing on as co-sponsor. "Piracy denies individuals who have invested in the creation and production of these goods a return on their investment thus reducing the incentive to invest in innovative products and new creative works. The end result is the loss of American jobs."

Among the SOPA/PIPA supporting lawmakers who were the biggest beneficiaries of donations from the PACs of six companies analyzed:

• Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah $15,500
• Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va. $14,000
• Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. $12,000
• Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas $11,000
• Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Calif. $10,000
• Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif. $7,000
• Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. $7,000
• Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. $7,000
• Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. $7,000
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. $6,500

A complete breakdown of donations by each company's PAC to lawmakers is available.

Well, the industrial age has given way to the information age and the balance of power is shifting further and further toward consumers, especially those with actively Web-connected lives. For a telling example, look no further than the recent fiasco surrounding GoDaddy and their now former support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

GoDaddy could have weathered some Twitter name-calling, but when customers started transferring domain names to other providers, the company was forced to publicly reexamine its position on SOPA. In just two days, more than 37,000 domains were transferred from GoDaddy to competing providers. That's a mere drop in the bucket amidst the 50 million domains currently registered with GoDaddy, but if allowed to fester, the company's latest PR disaster could have cost it some serious revenue.

The Crowd or the Mob? Either Way, Its Voices Are Loud and Clear

The lessons of the incident were not lost on other companies, who have begun to pull support for SOPA. It's unlikely that the RIAA and other industry groups will have a change of heart, but companies more closely aligned to the tech industry, such as Nintendo, Electronic Arts and Sony, saw what happened to GoDaddy and have since reversed their stance as well.

The episode was an instructive one for GoDaddy, but it also speaks volumes about the power the Web and social media hands to everyday people. No longer are things strictly top-down, even if real power and wealth are still largely concentrated among a relative few. In the past, a company of GoDaddy's size could support whatever screwed up and backwards legislation it wanted. Today, if such a move is perceived to strike at the heart of the Internet, the Internet will strike back.

This is not the first example of the power of the crowd. Things got noisy enough on sites like ComcastMustDie.com for the cable behemoth to take a more proactive role in online community management and customer service. As many subscribers will attest, the company still has a long way to go, but it has made progress. You can just about manage to hit the "Tweet" button after typing an angry anti-Comcast sentiment on Twitter before getting a response from one of the company's many social media managers. This may or may not lead to a satisfactory resolution in each case, but at least the company is paying attention. That was something they didn't have to do on quite this scale before.

But Is This a Good Thing?

A recent post on Gawker makes the argument that this phenomenon is actually a bad thing, resulting in a power trip for the Reddit community and leading to some less-than-ideal consequences down the line.

"While great for short bursts of fundraising or getting out a timely message, purely digital mobs like Reddit or the hacktivist collective Anonymous are not well-suited for thoughtful, sustained participation in the political process," writes Adrian Chen. "Fuck the "Wisdom of the crowd." The thinking of the internet hive mind is shallow and frantic, scrambling from one outrage to the next."

To be sure, some of what goes on amongst the Reddit is questionable and not every member of that particular community has their facts straight at all times. But they're far from the only player in these scenarios, even if they do often provide a solid launch pad for digital protest campaigns. What's more remarkable is what the architecture of the Web generally, as well as its social tools, are beginning - yes, only beginning - to enable.

This isn't to suggest that the Internet can solve all of our problems and lead to some utopian, ultra-democratic society. Indeed, most companies won't reverse their stance on SOPA, only the ones that are uniquely threatened by the ire of loud, Web-based communities. Ultimately, the online outcry could fail to block the legislation itself.

Update: GoDaddy has responded to Namecheap's accusations. See the statement below.

We wanted to give our customers a quick update on the status of domain transfers associated with one of our competitors, GoDaddy.

First, we're very sorry that some of you in the past 24 hours have experienced delays in transferring domains over to us.

As many customers have recently complained of transfer issues, we suspect that this competitor is thwarting efforts to transfer domains away from them.

Specifically, GoDaddy appears to be returning incomplete WHOIS information to Namecheap, delaying the transfer process. This practice is against ICANN rules.

We at Namecheap believe that this action speaks volumes about the impact that informed customers are having on GoDaddy's business.

It's a shame that GoDaddy feels they have to block their (former) customers from voting with their dollars. We can only guess that at GoDaddy, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Don't worry - each and every transfer request will be processed manually by our team. Every request will go through. We won't rest until everyone who wants to join the Namecheap family can do so!

Note: Italics emphasis is ours, bold by Namecheap.

The Verge reports that GoDaddy lost 21,054 domains on Dec. 23, 2011 yet gained 20,034 domains. While it has been widely reported that there has been an exodus from GoDaddy, it appears that much of the churn has been business as usual for the domain registrar.

Users began to boycott GoDaddy and transfer their domains away from the service after GoDaddy was revealed to be one of the official supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act that has become very unpopular among technology circles. GoDaddy has since rescinded its support of SOPA but the damage has been done and the fact of the matter is that GoDaddy still supports SOPA in theory, if not in an official capacity.

Here is a screen shot from a user trying to transfer his website:

Reports surfaced last week that GoDaddy was calling clients with large numbers of registries that were trying to transfer away, begging them to stay. GoDaddy realizes that the cost of the SOPA blunder and PR nightmare could mean millions of dollars lost in the short term and less public trust in the longer run. Namecheap wants to position itself as the go-to destination for GoDaddy refugees. Hence, whatever Namecheap can do to make GoDaddy look bad in the process is good for business.

Are you transferring out of GoDaddy? Has the process been easy? Have you experienced delays? Let us know in the comments.

Update 5:18 EST, Dec. 26:

GoDaddy has responded to Namecheap's accusations in an email to tech blog TechCrunch. In the statement, Richard Merdinger, senior director of product development at GoDaddy, says that Namecheap never contacted GoDaddy about normal rate limit blocking for transferring of domains. According to Merdinger, the block has been removed and GoDaddy is not hindering domain transfers to Namecheap. See the statement sent to tech blog TechCrunch below:

Namecheap posted their accusations in a blog, but to the best our of knowledge, has yet to contact Go Daddy directly, which would be common practice for situations like this. Normally, the fellow registrar would make a request for us to remove the normal rate limiting block which is a standard practice used by Go Daddy, and many other registrars, to rate limit Whois queries to combat WhoIs abuse.

Because some registrars (and other data gathering, analyzing and reporting entities) have legitimate need for heavy port 43 access, we routinely grant requests for expanded access per an SOP we've had in place for many years. Should we make contact with Namecheap, and learn they need similar access, we would treat that request similarly.

As a side note, we have seen some nefarious activity this weekend which came from non-registrar sources. But, that is not unusual for a holiday weekend, nor would it cause legitimate requests to be rejected. Nevertheless, we have now proactively removed the rate limit for Namecheap, as a courtesy, but it is important to point out, there still may be back-end IP addresses affiliated with Namecheap of which we are unaware. For complete resolution, we should be talking to each other -- an effort we are initiating since they have not done so themselves.

-Rich Merdinger
Sr. Director of Product Development - Domains
Go Daddy

Several commenters and people on Twitter have noted that of the several domains they transferred off of GoDaddy, the last few have taken a lot longer than the first. What has been your experience? Let us know in the comments.

In the statement published on its website, Go Daddy maintains that "fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance," reminding us that the company has been working on the legislation. But it admits, in the face of massive boycotts, that "we can clearly do better."

Here is the full text of Go Daddy's press release:

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Dec. 23, 2011) - Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" currently working its way through U.S. Congress.

"Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future," Jones said.

Not unsurprisingly, this news does not sit well with many of the Internet's most vocal SOPA opponents, especially on Reddit. A thread that popped up on the site today decries GoDaddy's support for SOPA and encourages users to transfer their domains to another provider. The conversation, which has more than a few choice words for GoDaddy, has grown quite long.

So Why Does GoDaddy Support SOPA Anyway?

"As much as some would like to paint a bleak picture, this debate is not about Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley," reads a statement GoDaddy filed with the U.S. House of Representatives.  "This debate is about preserving, protecting, and creating American jobs and protecting American consumers from the dangers that they face on-line."

GoDaddy goes on to condemn the ease with which people can conduct illegal activity like selling fake drugs and sharing copyrighted material on the Internet today and dismisses concerns about the potential drawbacks of SOPA and the Protect IP Act. Critics claim that this legislation hands too much power over to corporations and authorities to police the Internet and could lead to wholesale censorship online. GoDaddy disagrees.

"This bill cannot reasonably be equated with censorship.  This bill promotes action pursuant to preexisting criminal and civil laws," the company said.  "Not only is there no First Amendment concern, but the notion that we should turn a blind eye to criminal conduct because other countries may take oppressive steps in response is an affront to the very fabric of this nation."

Whatever the logic of GoDaddy's position may be, SOPA critics are not buying it. The calls to boycott the company have begun to spread beyond Reddit and competing domain registrars are using the opportunity to promote their own services. Namecheap, a provider frequently cited in the Reddit thread (Namecheap's social media manager is active in the discussion), has offered up discount codes like BYEBYEGD for users who wish to move away from GoDaddy. Talk of customers moving their domains has even come up in the company's own support forums.

Still, we're talking about a company that has over 50 million domains registered and it's not yet clear how widespread opposition to SOPA is beyond the tech community. Whether or not these efforts will have a sizable impact on GoDaddy's business remains to be seen.

UPDATE: The anti-GoDaddy sentiment has only spread in the last few hours. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham announced that pro-SOPA companies would no longer be welcome at the incubator's Demo Days and other events. Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh has threatened to move more than 1,000 domain names from GoDaddy to another provider and is publicly encouraging Google to reconsider its relationship with GoDaddy as well.

UPDATE #2:Automattic founder and Wordpress creator Matt Mullenweg tweeted a link this morning to GoDaddyBoycott.org, a site that encourages users to sign an online petition against GoDaddy and pledge to transfer their domains away from the service. The site looks to be an extension of Fight For the Future, an anti-SOPA advocacy site.

UPDATE #3: In response to the wave of criticism and boycott threats, GoDaddy has revised its stance on SOPA, announcing that they no longer support the legislation in its current form.

ReadWriteWeb will be keeping a close eye on this story and SOPA developments in general in the days and weeks ahead, so stay tuned for more news and analysis.

• What's the most effective way to spread false political rumors? Not blogs. Not Twitter. Email. http://bit.ly/e674zt via @millermccune
• GoDaddy.com CEO kills elephant, poses with carcass, is "not ashamed". Outrage ensues. http://lat.ms/dOPADN via @latimesoutposts
• The worst jobs in the world matrix. Yep, World of Warcraft gold farmer makes the list: http://bit.ly/fSrskX via @LaphamsQuart
• The iPad isn't a product, it's a badge - a way to identify ourselves in a world in which the traditional ways of classifying ourselves by social class and mainstream religion are losing their purchase: http://ind.pn/ed9EZG via @StevenParrott
• Online 3D fire ants! http://bit.ly/evXdd5 via @BeeSpotter

What links did we miss? Let us know in the comments.

As we learned when studying the case of the dancing hippie, it's the first follower that "transforms a lone nut into a leader."

The Post quotes Rep. Christopher Smith, the man behind "a bill that would make it a crime for U.S. companies to share personal user information with 'Internet-restricting' countries", as saying that "Google fired a shot heard 'round the world, and now a second American company has answered the call to defend the rights of the Chinese people."

GoDaddy's move, however, is not the purely altruistic act of solidarity it might first appear to be. A new Chinese policy enacted last December upped the ante, requiring registrants of .cn domain names to submit photos and business identification, which would then be forwarded to the government. The law would require GoDaddy to retroactively gather information from domain registrants.

While this certainly has extremely ominous implications in terms of human rights, we have to wonder how much the law implies in financial terms. GoDaddy is currently responsible for more than 40 million domain names, a number that is three times the nearest competitor. We don't know what percent of that is in China, but it could be quite the endeavor to go back and acquire extra registrant information before sending it to the government.

On the other hand, we can hope that this is all being done for the good of humanity. And even if not, if it has that result in the end, does it matter what the reasons for the actions were? All skepticism aside, Google has found a friend, and the hardest part may be behind it.

As Derek Sivers, the man behind the dancing hippie video, told us last time, "When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in."

GoDaddy, it seems, has stood up, joined in and now we're wondering what big player might be next.

In some respects, these domains are similar to GoDaddy's SmartSpace or Chi.mp, only that these two products are far more flexible.

Online Phonebook

At its best, .tel domains could become something like an online phonebook, though the minimal amount of flexibility will surely disappoint many potential users. In its current state, .tel users can't even add their own logos to these domains.

GoDaddy and Chi.mp

GoDaddy and Chi.mp might be targeting a slightly different audience, but users get far more flexibility with these products, including the ability to aggregate their activity on social networks and to apply different themes and logos to their profiles.

In the end, the success of the .tel domains will depend on third-party developers. If other websites, social networks, or mobile phone address books start supporting these domains (and those of Telnic's competitors), then this might become an easy way to keep address books up to date. But then, you could also do this with any service that provides you with a vCard.

Can it Work?

In an age where the Internet is still synonymous with .com addresses (or their local equivalent) for the vast majority of users, it remains to be seen if these .tel domains will find a lot of takers. Also, the average price for .tel domains for individuals we found from US registrars was around $20, which is a lot more than most people pay for their .com domains - and those give their owners a lot more flexibility.

With the new SmartSpace service from GoDaddy, anyone can create a personal web site which aggregates your activity from across the social web, combine that with other sources of news and information, and then create a personalized start page containing everything of interest to them. The service can also be used as a blogging platform with social elements like chat already built in. The idea is that you can use the SmartSpace platform to create the kind of site that's right for you, whether that's a social network of sorts, a traditional web site with social elements, a place to host your podcasts, or whatever else you want.

SmartSpace is designed to be easy to use, even for non-technical users. With a click of a button, you can grab content from sites like flickr, YouTube, Google News, Facebook, MySpace, or any other web site that offers an RSS feed.

You can even customize this content to your own personal preferences. For example, if you only want to see Flickr photos of lolcats, you can just type in "lolcat" in the tag field provided. Alternatively, you could select the RSS feed of a particular person's photos.

In addition to this dynamic content form across the social web, GoDaddy also makes available various pre-selected news feeds which you can add if desired. This content is categorized by subject, and is similar to the types of selections that many of today's personalized homepages offer.

Chat & Email

The Chat application lets you have online text conversations right on the site. With the included administrative controls, you can launch a room, invite users, ban users, and participate in both public and private chat sessions. Again, there's nothing technical involved in adding this to your page - the app is already set up and ready to use. All you have to do is make a few choices about how it's displayed and whether it's loaded by default when you log in.

Also, because SocialSpace users have purchased a domain name via GoDaddy, there's an option to set up email addresses using that name. The interface for doing so is much easier to manage than GoDaddy's usual UI for creating email addresses (an ugly and geeky interface). Here, you're basically able to push a button and set up multiple email addresses associated with your domain. The inboxes for these can then be added as widgets to your homepage.

Photo Albums

If you don't keep your images online with a web service like Flickr, you also have the option to make your SmartSpace an online photo album using the SmartSpace photo application. With this, you can upload photos from your computer and then share those photos both publicly and privately in albums that are added to your page.

Web Site and Blogs

For text-based content, you can choose to either add a web site or blog to your homepage. With these options, you can select from a number of pre-built templates to configure the site. Although not as robust a platform as WordPress, the blog will probably work fine for casual users who want to take advantage of the other elements of the SmartSpace service.

Just Another Personalized Homepage Or A New Type Of Social Network?

SocialSpace could be linked to some patent filings the company filed earlier this year which describe a web portal that functions as a social network aggregator. According to those filings, the aggregation could be done using login systems like OpenID. Although there's no mention of OpenID integration in the SmartSpace support documents yet, we hope that integration is something they plan to add in the future.

Still, even without OpenID, what GoDaddy has launched today is a viable competitor to the other personalized homepages out there like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes, etc. But GoDaddy's SocialSpace goes beyond what those sites offer in a number of ways. Although widgetized content like photos and RSS feeds can be added to nearly any start page today, GoDaddy actually lets you own a domain name, set up a blog or website and then easily, instantly turn it into a personalized social network that aggregates content from the social web and includes chat functionality for instant interactions with your friends.

Will SocialSpace kill MySpace and Facebook? That's highly doubtful, but it could be a nice aggregator for those looking to establish a web presence with minimal work. And because it's from GoDaddy, a household name thanks to their high profile TV commercials and ad campaigns, this move also represents what may be the final leap where "social media" fully crosses over to the mainstream use and acceptance.

More Info

Prices for SmartSpace start at $4.99/month for 2 months. From there, the prices are as follows: 12 mo: $4.74/month, 24 mo: $4.49/month, or 36 mo: $4.24/month. You can watch a short introductory video here. ]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/godaddy_unveils_mainstream_social_web_aggregator.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/godaddy_unveils_mainstream_social_web_aggregator.php Product Reviews Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:45:00 -0800 Sarah Perez