Go Daddy, the well-known Internet registry, made a business blunder. The company supported the controversal Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Many people noticed, including Jimmy Wales, founder and head of Wikipedia, and were not happy. Wales publicly said he was going to pull Wikipedia’s domains, some of the most popular sites on the Web away from GoDaddy. Whoops.
Go Daddy’s executives, who aren’t fools, immediately started to back away from SOPA. But, even as Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman put his company in full reverse, he kept the door open to SOPA-like laws. Adelman wrote, “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.”
That loop hole of future potential laws appears to have been enough for Wales to go ahead and pull the trigger on Wikipedia’s Go Daddy registration. Wikipedia’s parent company, Wikimedia, announced on March 9th that they had completed their transfer of Wikipedia sites from GoDaddy.