Squarespace, a hosting company, told Ars on Wednesday that it would soon be booting some of its current customers. The company currently hosts numerous extremist sites, including freedomfront.org, identityevropa.com, and npiamerica.org, among others.
"In light of recent events, we have made the decision to remove a group of sites from our platform," Terry Wei, a Squarespace spokesman, e-mailed Ars. "We have given the site owners 48 hours' notice. We cannot provide further information at this time, but we’ll be in touch as soon as we have an update."
Wei did not respond to Ars' request for further comment.
Earlier on Wednesday, CloudFlare, one of the largest CDN providers, yanked the "pro" account for DailyStormer.com, a neo-Nazi website, after previously taking a different position. CDNs, or content distribution networks, act as a buffer between a Web user and a host, often times to improve online speed, to save bandwidth costs, and to prevent sites from being knocked offline.
CloudFlare's founder, Matthew Prince, wrote a blog post later in the day explaining the company's position.
"The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology," he wrote.
CloudFlare continues to provide CDN services to nearly a third of the top white nationalist sites as identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center, including amren.com, conservative-headlines.com, faithandheritage.com, patriotic-flags.com, stormfront.org, and more.
"It isn't DNS that is key for sites like StormFront or the Daily Stormer; it’s the CDN infrastructure and [denial of service] protection that keeps these sites alive," Nicholas Weaver, a computer researcher based at the International Computer Science Institute, told Ars. "CloudFlare is the key infrastructure that supports these sites."
In addition, on Wednesday, Apple said it would pull support for Apple Pay to a number of websites that sell "White Pride" apparel, and PayPal ceased its services to VDARE, a white nationalist group.
For its part, Dreamhost, which hosts at least two white nationalist websites, Forza Nuova USA and NorthwestFront.org, said that it will continue to serve them.Brett Dunst, a company spokesman, e-mailed Ars:
Our longstanding policy, one that has been in place since we began in 1997, has been that we will host any website as long as its content is legal in the United States of America... We will take action when approached by law enforcement to remove websites that are operating unlawfully, but we do not otherwise impose restrictions on customer content. As stalwart supporters of the Constitution's First Amendment, we believe that hosting providers should not be in the business of dictating acceptable content among its users. We are a resource for publishers of all backgrounds, not a clearinghouse for thoughts and opinions (however distasteful some of them may be.)
Michael Goldstein, a spokesman for Tucows, which hosts radixjournal.com—a website also run by white nationalist leader Richard Spencer—told Ars that the company has "wrestled internally" over what to do in recent days.
On Tuesday, the company put out a statement saying that extending domain privacy services to Daily Stormer violated the company's terms of service.
"We do not believe it is our place to deny free speech protection unless that speech is directed to inciting imminent violence, harm or danger, as the Daily Stormer did with its piece glorifying the death of Heather Heyer," Goldstein e-mailed on Wednesday. "In fact, we should rarely even be the arbiter of whether that line has been crossed. Sure, this one is pretty universally offensive. But there will always be one that is debatable. I don't think anyone wants an Internet where Tucows, GoDaddy, or Google decide which opinions deserve a medium."
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