Starting a business is anxiety-inducing enough. But if you really want to get a new entrepreneur hyperventilating, just remind them they aren't only launching a small business. They're creating a brand. 

So what shape does that brand take, particularly in the largest advertising venue on the planet — the worldwide web? — Read the rest

After white supremacist site The Daily Stormer published a nasty article about the woman killed by a Nazi in Charlottesville, domain registrar GoDaddy finally decided to boot them from its service.

Godaddy has censored a prominent Mexican political site that was critical of the government and a proposed law to suppress public protests. Godaddy says that it suspended 1dmx.org after a request from a "Special Agent Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Embassy, Mexico City." — Read the rest

Naoki Hiroshima was lucky enough to snag a one-character Twitter username: @N. Over the years, he'd been offered large sums — as much as $50,000 — for the name, but he kept it. Then, according to a horrifying first-person account, a hacker socially engineered the last four digits of his credit-card out of Paypal, used that information to seize control of his Godaddy account, and threated to trash all of Hiroshima's websites unless Hiroshima transferred @N to the hacker. — Read the rest

Naoki Hiroshima had (i.e. squatted) a rare and valuable Twitter handle, @N. It was extorted from him, he claims, by a scammer who figured out that PayPal reveals part of one's credit card number during security verification—and that GoDaddy accepts the same part of the number during security verification. — Read the rest

Asif Ali is the latest to find fault with shifty domain registrar GoDaddy.

Me: "Why did you release a domain that belonged to me..the registration was still active. And two days before the domain expired, I renewed the .co domain at $30 for a year".

If you manage your domains through GoDaddy or are hosting a website with them, it's probably down right now and has been for about an hour. Take advantage of this time to find out which ones of your friends use GoDaddy in order to ridicule them. — Read the rest

Domain registrar GoDaddy drew a lot of bad publicity for supporting SOPA, resulting in a large loss of business and a reversal on its public position. But wherever GoDaddy stands on SOPA, it remains one of the worst places in the world to host a domain. — Read the rest

Todd Wasserman of Mashable says "It's time to cut GoDaddy a Break." Marco Arment (creator of the fabulous Instapaper) disagrees:

Even if you're OK with their support of SOPA, their sexist and tasteless commercials, and their elephant-killing CEO, they're still a terrible registrar: their upselling is misleading, sneaky, and sleazy, their control panel is horrendously confusing, slow, and buggy (like the rest of their site), their DNS servers are unreliable and randomly ignore changes you make, their support is terrible, and they often block outbound transfers for no apparent reason.

David Rusenko, co-founder of website hosting service Weebly.com, describes how GoDaddy wiped his domain name records, only restoring them after a phone call. All it took was a single complaint against a single user.

"They had received a complaint about the content of a site, and that they were removing the DNS entries for weebly.com

GoDaddy just released a statement withdrawing its support for SOPA.

Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" currently working its way through U.S. Congress.

"Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better," Warren Adelman, Go Daddy's newly appointed CEO, said.

Nick sez, "I wrote a post on my company's blog (The Positive Internet Company) explaining why SOPA is a big deal not just in the US, but for the Internet as a whole. We have rescued a number of sites from malign censorship (like Dr Ben Goldacre's 'Bad Science' blog), so we know exactly how such laws will be abused. — Read the rest

Maxwell sez, "Following GoDaddy's announcement backing the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, many customers have started to move their domains to other hosts. I guess that throwing your customers to the wolves isn't a good business tactic." — Read the rest

The UK Music Publishers' Association filed a seemingly groundless copyright claim against the International Music Score Library Portal, a repository of out-of-copyright sheet-music, over the score for Rachmaninoff's The Bells. The MPA sent the complaint to GoDaddy, the IMSLP's domain registrar, who took down the entire IMSLP site without further notice. — Read the rest

[Video Link: GoDaddy chief executive Bob Parsons kills an elephant in Zimbabwe. Graphic content.]

Just now on CNN, blathering idiot GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons phoned in, Charlie-Sheen-style, to dig an even bigger hole for himself after the Zimbabwe Elephant Killing Debacle. — Read the rest

GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons: Christ, what an asshole. (via @tara)

Domain registrar GoDaddy says it will stop registering Web sites in China in response to new regulations requiring domain registration applicants to disclose extensive personal data, including photographs of themselves. Whatever your thoughts about GoDaddy as human rights champions and defenders of all that is good in the world, the move could be symbolically significant: they're the world's largest domain registration company.

GoDaddy won't allow supporters of blogger Hossein Derakhshan on MetaFilter to renew hoder.com, which expires in three weeks. "Hoder," as he is known online, has been in prison in Iran for the past year. (via Cyrus Farivar) | UPDATE: looks like it's been successfully renewed now.

If I'm reading the pop-up window correctly, domain registrar Godaddy recommends against purchasing .tv domain names because the island of Tuvalu, which the domain represents, is sinking. One more reason not to get bent out of shape over the fact that CNN bought "boingboing.tv" — Read the rest

RateMyCop.com — a site where the general public can comment on police officers — has been shut down by its hosting company, GoDaddy. The company claims his site had been engaged in "suspicious activity." Various police departments and organizations have spoken out against RateMyCop, arguing that it would reveal the identities of undercovers (undercovers are not listed on RateMyCop) or put police in danger by revealing their addresses and personal information (personal information and addresses are not given on RateMyCop), or that it would be used to grind axes against cops (RateMyCop has a facility for police rebuttal). — Read the rest