The SEO fail of the week goes to none other than GoDaddy.com for their support of SOPA. While everyone is pretty much in agreement that stopping online piracy is a good thing, what no one that is actually minimally computer literate agrees with is the actual legislation being voted on by a pack of politicians that think the way you turn a computer on is by asking your page or secretary. The inherent problem lies within having people with no understanding of technology drafting, debating and then potentially passing legislation related to technology. If you had a heart murmur, you wouldn’t seek a second opinion on treatment options from your tailor, and stopping piracy online is something that is not only impossible, but shows how idiotic the people that think stopping piracy is possible- and more so that they thing the elected officials of the US of A are the people to make that fairytale happen.
The people at GoDaddy should more than realize that online piracy is just a matter of fact. It happens, and so long as there is a profit in it, the practice will continue to happen. GoDaddy can’t even monitor piracy on the domains they sell and host much less any others on the web, so their support of SOPA can only be interpreted in a very narrow set of ways. They possibly are very anti-piracy and very gung-ho believe in America our politicians know what they’re doing and we can trust them brainwashed. Semper Fi and all that.
Possibly they wanted to show support because doing so may buy them some leniency with the government. What leniency? Who knows? All anyone knows for sure is that if you ever dealt with GoDaddy you can relate to the idea that the best thing about them is their commercials – and seeing how much they suck, that is nothing to brag about. Purely speculating here, maybe they threw in their support without remembering to read what they were supporting first. Maybe they wanted to be like that idiot that trolls forums and then posts “first” believing they will be the first post because they think the cool kids dig that. They look dumb doing it, and dumber when they are actually the eight post. Which leads to the third option – is GoDaddy just dumb?
They would have to realize that legislation the nature of SOPA would negatively impact their bottom line. They will lose domains – aside from the 21,000+ that left for no reason but their support of SOPA. Legitimate websites that are somehow tagged as SOPA violators will be taken down. Online commerce in general will suffer. Privacy will become an even bigger joke. While that is all happening, GoDaddy can sit back and say “Yea! We supported this!” And don’t be fooled – even though GoDaddy withdrew support for SOPA as it went through Congress, they are still supporting the same version of the bill in the Senate. 21,000 lost domains and counting – a million dollar SEO fail!
