GoDaddy, home of lousy Internet hosting and scandalous Super Bowl ads, has inexplicably been a success with their cut-rate domain registration and hosting.
Meanwhile, in the Middle Kingdom the Chinese government continues grasp as many levers of control over Internet users as possible.
To register your own web name in the Chinese domain name space (eg, mycooldomain.cn) the government now takes your picture and gathers your vital stats.
Can’t see what could possibly be a problem with that.
Well, GoDaddy is not going to GoAlong, and said as much in a hearing before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.* Here’s the WaPo writeup. “We decided we didn’t want to be agents of China” sayeth GoDaddy’s top lawyer. Good for them.
Chinese netizens can still register anything else unencumbered – eg, mycooldomain.com. For now.
The real danger is that at some point China may decide to do the Simon and Garfunkel trick and turn all of China into an Internet Island.
Oh, a curious observation out of the hearing – apparently human-rights or politically active web sites related to China that GoDaddy hosts are more often attacked. What a strange coincidence.
* No, I don’t think it went quite like this.
