The bills' progress has been temporarily halted in Congress until January 2012, but nonetheless, opposition the House's much-criticized Stop Online Piracy Act and its counterpart in the Senate, the PROTECT-IP Act, is growing as opponents seek to punish those businesses and lawmakers that have publicly expressed support of the bill.
The first targets: Controversial domain registrar GoDaddy.com, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN).
GoDaddy.com has already experienced massive blowback from irate, anti-SOPA customers over the past week, with upwards of 120,000 domains being transferred away from GoDaddy.com's hosting services to those of other competitors after a user of the popular social news website Reddit on December 22 posted a thread about transferring 51 domains away from the service and invited likeminded Web users to follow suit on or before Thursday, December 29.
Prominent SOPA critics, including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Ben Huh, founder and CEO of Cheezburger (the company that monetized the LOLCats meme and other similar Internet ephemera) and web-sharing service Imgur have all joined the GoDaddy boycott as well, pledging to move all of their thousands of Web addresses to registrars that have come out against the legislation.
Those registrars opposed to SOPA and PIPA include Namecheap, Name and Hover, and all of them have been or are offering discounts to accept GoDaddy defectors on Thursday.
The damage to GoDaddy is undoubtedly mitigated by the fact that the company continues to add new domains at a clip almost, but not quite enough to offset the total number of transfers away.
Still, there's no denying the company has been floored by the negative response it's received for its initial support of the piracy legislation currently worming its way through Congress (a response perhaps exacerbated by fact that GoDaddy helped craft the legislation and would be exempt from takedown notices and liability for failure to takedown as the legislation is currently written, which critics have been quick to point out).
GoDaddy not onlydropped its support for SOPA and PIPA, but has been reportedly having representatives call and plead with customers not to switch because of its waffling political position on the bill.
Meanwhile, the company's new CEO Warren Adelman hasn't officially opposed the piracy legislation, telling Gizmodo it wasn't “ready in its current form,â€