Godaddy shuts down Ukrainian NGO domain at Russia's request

by
in internet on (#E7SH)
story imageA Ukrainian nonprofit organization, started in 2012 as a watchdog for human rights and democratic development in Ukraine, had its website temporarily taken offline by a subsidiary of the U.S.-based registrar company GoDaddy.com at the behest of the Russian government.

The Maidan Monitoring Information Center announced today that one of its domain names-maidanua.org-had been blocked indefinitely by Wild West Domains, LLC, the GoDaddy subsidiary, following a formal request by Roskomnadzor, Russia's telecom regulator and censor. "They refuse to reply to our requests," says Nataliya Zubar, board chair. However, following numerous requests by The Daily Beast to GoDaddy for comment, the URL appears to have been reactivated.

"We registered it with a U.S.-based registrar as an alias because we were afraid of censorship attempts from Ukrainian authorities at the time. The threat of censorship in Ukraine has dissipated after the political breakthrough of March 2014, but now, ironically, we are being censored by a U.S.-based company."
Reply 6 comments

sinister? or just standard operating procedure? (Score: 2, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-07-14 06:40 (#E8A4)

My guess is that GoDaddy responded the same way that they probably do for any DMCA take down request -- take the site down first, and then wait to see if anyone notices or makes a stink. They must get way too many requests to research them individually.

Re: sinister? or just standard operating procedure? (Score: 3, Informative)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2015-07-14 16:29 (#EA16)

If it was a DMCA takedown, the owner of the domain should have been notified, and it should only have been reinstated once the owner responded to the notice and accepted legal liability (no way any 3rd party could properly investigate a copyright infringement claim, certainly not in a few hours). Meanwhile "the Information Center said it received no explanation from the company for why its domain was taken down." and "Still we had not got a single communication from GoDaddy."

Re: sinister? or just standard operating procedure? (Score: 1)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-07-14 19:26 (#EAJM)

When has Godaddy *not* been sinister? If this was dreamhost, host gator, bluehost, or aws, I'd give them the benifit of the doubt, but godaddy: no. Its either evil or stupid. Sometimes both.

Meh. (Score: 3, Funny)

by balderdash@pipedot.org on 2015-07-14 21:38 (#EAXQ)

Godaddy is never a good answer, to any question.

Re: Meh. (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-07-17 14:13 (#EM8B)

Good incest pun. Brightened my day. Stored for future use if a situation calls for it.