UPDATED 22:42 EDT / AUGUST 20 2017

NEWS

The Daily Stormer retreats to the dark web after being booted offline yet again

Neo-Nazi hate site The Daily Stormer briefly reappeared online for a few hours on Friday, only to be dumped a few hours later by its new web hosting provider.

Dubbed as the “top hate site in America”, the Daily Stormer was at the center of controversy last week after a blog posted to the site apparently mocked a victim of the car attack in Charlottesville during a white supremacist rally that left one person dead and 19 injured. The site was quickly dumped by GoDaddy Inc., its original domain host, before Google Inc. and a Russian web host followed suit after Daily Stormer’s operators tried to register it with their services.

On Friday, the Daily Stormer tried yet again to find a new host, signing up with a smaller operator called Namecheap Inc., only to be booted off for a fourth time.

Richard Kirkendall, the chief executive officer at Namecheap, explained his decision in a blog post, saying that the site was home to specific references of incitements to violence and that it couldn’t be tolerated by his company. He added that he felt the decision didn’t contradict his company’s advocacy of free speech.

“This alone is a drastic departure from traditional freedom of speech principles and endorsement of a very violent eventuality,” Kirkendall wrote. “Based on this statement alone, the site should be legitimately shut down as the speech constitutes an incitement of violence.”

Namecheap becomes the latest in a growing list of web companies that have publicly distanced themselves from white supremacists. Other examples include Apple Inc. and PayPal Inc., both of which said last week they’re disabling support for sites that sell white supremacist and other hate groups’ merchandise. Meanwhile, Facebook Inc. and Reddit have both moved to ban hate groups’ pages on their own domains.

One company that originally refused to stop providing services to the Daily Stormer later decided to do so. CloudFlare Inc., a content delivery network that provides protection against distributed-denial-of-services attacks, initially said it wouldn’t make any judgment on the Daily Stormer’s content, only to pull out later after one of the site’s readers claimed the company was “one of us”.

There is still one holdout though. ProPublica reported late Friday that a second content delivery network called BitMitigate was stepping up to offer its services to the Daily Stormer. That move was most likely a publicity stunt, but in any case the company’s 20-year old founder Nick Lim justified his decision by saying that he was a proponent of free speech and that infrastructure companies shouldn’t drop clients just because they disagree with them.

Unfortunately for the Daily Stormer, BitMitigate’s support hasn’t helped it much, as it still lacks a web hosting provider that’s willing to tolerate it. However, CNet reported the site is still lurking online in the background, having retreated to the “dark web” that can only be accessed via the Tor browser.

Image: geralt/pixabay

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