Neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer rocketed to international recognition over the weekend when GoDaddy announced that it would stop being the registrar for the site’s domain. (This is different from hosting the site’s content, a service GoDaddy didn’t provide to the Daily Stormer, the company told us.)
After GoDaddy dumped it, the Daily Stormer registered its domain with the Google Domains service. That was revealed by checking dailystormer.com in the free Whois lookup service, provided by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization that oversees domain management. Domain registration with Google appears to be a self-service affair, so it’s possible Google didn’t even realize it had neo-Nazis as new customers.
We reached out to Google for comment, and its response was quick. It emailed a statement from a spokesperson saying, “We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service.” By the time Google sent out its statement, it had not only been contacted by Fast Company, but excoriated on Twitter.
We also spoke with Google and got a breakdown of how it all happened:
— We don’t want our services used to incite violence
— Domain was registered at 7.51 PDT
— Announced cancellation by 11:02 PDT
— As soon as we were made aware that Daily Stormer had registered its domain with Google, we began taking action to remove them for violating our terms of service.
This story was updated at 11:40 a.m. PDT.
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