Google (GOOG, GOOGL) is cancelling the domain for the white supremacist site Daily Stormer due to a “specific, immediate concern about inciting violence,” a spokesperson told Yahoo Finance.
The search-engine giant, which hosts website domains through its Google Domains service, made the decision to cut the cord to the hate site after GoDaddy (GDDY) told the Daily Stormer it had 24 hours to move to another domain hosting service.
GoDaddy, which has been criticized in the past for hosting such website domains, decided to cancel Daily Stormer’s domain following a post that was critical of a woman who was run down by a car at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday.
Daily Stormer immediately made headlines on Monday morning when it moved its domain to Google.
A Google spokesperson initially explained that the Daily Stormer’s domain was being cancelled for violating Google’s terms of service. There’s no mention of inciting violence in the company’s terms of service document, though, it does state that Google can reject a domain’s registration at its own discretion.
A website’s domain is the name that tells your browser where to look in the vastness of the internet for the content you’re seeking. Yahoo’s domain, for example, is Yahoo.com. Without domains we would have to type in the internet protocol address, a long string of numbers and decimals, to point our browser to specific sites.
Without Google to host its domain, the Daily Stormer will have to seek out another hosting service. Chances are it won’t have much trouble doing so, though, as there are still plenty of domain registration services available.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which keeps track of hate groups, calls Daily Stormer the “top hate site in America.” Following the events in Charlottesville, self-identified members of the hacker collective Anonymous took aim at the Daily Stormer, posting that they had taken control of the site and indicating that they would shut it down completely in 24 hours.
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