GoDaddy.com, loses thousands of customers for supporting controversial piracy bill

GoDaddy.com, the world's largest registrar of internet domain names, lost thousands of customers last week, after the company supported a controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill before Congress that many fear could heavily restrict the internet.

A poster on Reditt.com called for people to move their domain names away from GoDaddy and suggested 29 December as the day to do so.

Yesterday the Scottsdale, Arizona-based GoDaddy.com reversed its position and pulled its support for the SOPA Bill, but not before more than 70,000 domains transferred their names from GoDaddy.com to other domain registrars.

The SOPA Bill has been critisised by many as an attempt by lawmakers to censor the internet by stopping "foreign infringing sites" hosting copyrighted material that are directed to internet users in the US. The bill intends to curb online piracy of movies, television shows, music and counterfeit goods.

The bill would also require search engines to remove infringing sites, and bar DNS providers from directing traffic to these sites.

But SOPA would also make websites responsible for illegal copyright content uploaded by any user, making social networking sites like YouTube, Imgur and Facebook impossible to operate since users also upload their private videos like birthdays and weddings.