No One Is Cutting Go Daddy Any Slack
RELATED: Go Daddy Did In Fact Lose A Bunch of Customers Today
Details of Go Daddy's history of supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Thursday's planned boycott against the service have been all over the news lately, and it only makes all non-SOPA Go Daddy news seem all the more rage-inducing. On Wednesday, The Hollywood Reporter's Eriq Gardner posted a story that catches us up on Go Daddy's battle with the people that organize the Oscars:
Meanwhile, as all of this has been happening, GoDaddy has been engaged in a bare-knuckled litigation fight with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which puts on the Oscars each year. … In the lawsuit, AMPAS takes issue with GoDaddy’s "CashParking" program that allows users to buy a domain, "park" the page and collect a portion of revenue from GoDaddy's advertising partners on a pay-per-click basis. AMPAS alleges that the program has been used to register hundreds of websites such as 2011oscars.com, academyawardz.com, and betacademyawards.com.
This is crazy because Go Daddy's history of supporting SOPA -- let us remind you that Go Daddy still hasn't spoken out against the bill -- aligns directly with the interests of entertainment industry outfits like AMPAS. Though the AMPAS lawsuit and SOPA don't seem to be at all related, the renewed interest in the two-year-old case shows just how visceral the reaction's been to Go Daddy's support of the bill and its potential to enable Internet censorship in the United States.
RELATED: That Was Quick: Go Daddy Pulls Its Support of SOPA
Need more evidence? At almost the exact same time that THR's report went live, AllThingsD's Arik Hesseldahl published his own look-how-horrible-this-company-is post. You can almost hear him gritting his teeth in the lede:
Days after suffering a public-relations pounding that resulted in the loss of as many as 37,000 domains, Go Daddy, the privately held domain-name registrar and Web host, is resorting to its tried-and-true weapon for generating attention and maybe business: A nearly naked Danica Patrick. … If Go Daddy is looking for a tactic to help it change the subject from its sudden about-face in supporting the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) now before Congress, this probably isn’t it.
Like the AMPAS lawsuit, it's not news that Go Daddy uses "nearly naked Danica Patrick" or other nearly naked women to attract attention. (You can just check out the banned Go Daddy commercial at the top of this post if you don't believe us.) The company has been duly criticized for its sometimes sexist and exploitative ad campaigns. (In fact, there's an entire website devoted to the issue.) But Forbes contributor David Coursey best sums up the sentiment behind all of the attention with the headline on his brand new blog post: "Stupid GoDaddy Deserves Boycott."
