boycott – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Elon Says ExTwitter Will Sue The Group ExTwitter ‘Excitedly’ Joined Just Last Week

from the timing-is-everything dept

Elon Musk’s ExTwitter just set a new speed record: from enthusiastic joiner of an advertising coalition to potential plaintiff against the same organization in just over a week.

Sometimes, timing is everything.

This week has been a travel week for me, so on Tuesday evening, I wrote up a short article on last week’s news that ExTwitter had “rejoined GARM.” GARM is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which is a loose coalition focused on brand safety for advertisers, such that their ads are less likely to appear next to, say, neo-Nazi content.

The main focus of my post was that there was almost no way that anyone should believe that ExTwitter’s decision to rejoin GARM was a sincere statement that ExTwitter would now take brand safety and GARM’s recommendations seriously. Instead, I noted that whenever ExTwitter was desperate for advertisers to sign on, its advertising execs (Linda Yaccarino’s underlings) would tout its compliance with GARM guidelines. But then Elon would do something fucking crazy and drive away advertisers again.

I even predicted, “sooner or later (probably sooner) Elon will do something horrible…” I should have known that it would happen so soon that it was before I could even post my article.

Anyway, I wrote that Tuesday evening and scheduled it to go up on Techdirt on Thursday afternoon, since I’d be traveling and without internet access for large segments of time this week.

Little did I know that on Wednesday, before my post went up, Jim Jordan and the House Judiciary would release an astoundingly stupid “report” claiming that GARM was an antitrust-violating cartel that was pressuring websites into censoring conservatives.

And, in response to a tweet showing just a clip of some nonsense testimony at the House hearing about this report, Elon Musk announced on Thursday morning (before my post went up) that ExTwitter “has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators” (meaning GARM, its organizers, and its members) and also said that “hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution.”

Yes, that’s Elon Musk saying that he plans to file a civil lawsuit against GARM and its “collaborators” and hopes that state AGs will file criminal lawsuits against the very organization HIS COMPANY REJOINED JUST A WEEK EARLIER and celebrated with a hyped-up tweet:

So, last week ExTwitter was “excited to announce” that it’s rejoined GARM, and this week Elon says that GARM’s leaders should be criminally prosecuted, and he planned to sue them himself.

Cool, cool.

I can just imagine how Linda Yaccarino must feel about this. She clearly orchestrated the return to GARM as part of her desperate push to lure back advertisers.

But let’s be clear about this. Companies have their own First Amendment rights not to associate with anyone they want. And that includes not advertising on websites where your ads might show up next to controversial content, disinformation, or just general nonsense. Many companies recognize that it is bad for business to have advertisements showing up next to neo-Nazi content, or just plain old disinformation.

Private companies choosing not to advertise is not a violation of any law, civil or criminal. Private organizations setting up guidelines for brand safety is not an antitrust violation. Private organizations choosing not to advertise on the site formerly known as Twitter is an expression of their own First Amendment rights not to associate with whatever nonsense Elon is promoting these days.

Anyway, all that effort that Yaccarino put into “rejoining GARM” last week just went up in smoke. She was trying to convince advertisers that ExTwitter was a safe place for brand advertising, but now Elon is saying ExTwitter will be suing GARM and pushing for criminal prosecutions of everyone involved in GARM.

Which now includes Elon Musk’s ExTwitter as of last week. Can’t wait to see Elon sue himself.

What a clusterfuck of stupidity.

And I’m sure that it won’t be long before an Andrew Bailey of Missouri or a Ken Paxton of Texas opens an “investigation” into GARM (the group that Elon Musk’s company “excitedly” rejoined just last week).

Hilariously, this would be an actual First Amendment violation, in that it would be a government agency starting a criminal investigation for the pretty clear express purpose of intimidating companies out of expressing themselves.

Remember when Elon said he was against governments pressuring companies about their speech? Now he’s telling them to do that, but just to organizations he doesn’t like (even though his own company just joined the very same organization).

So, just to recap: last week, Elon’s company rejoined GARM, the advertising coalition to help make sure platforms are a safe place for brand advertisers to advertise. This week, the House Judiciary Committee falsely claimed that the First Amendment-protected rights of companies not to advertise on ExTwitter was an antitrust violation, leading to “First Amendment absolutist” Elon Musk saying he’s going to sue the very organization his company just “excitedly” joined. And, to top it all off, Elon hopes that states will open criminal investigations into this activity — an act that would actually violate the First Amendment rights of GARM and those involved with it. Which includes Elon Musk’s own company.

I should have stayed off the internet even longer.

Filed Under: advertisers, advertising, boycott, brand safety, elon musk, free speech, garm, house judiciary committee, jim jordan
Companies: garm, twitter, wfa, x

Reddit Communities Decide To Extend Boycott After CEO Says It’s Almost Over

from the downvote dept

Oops.

As you likely know, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, desperate to show Wall St. that his company can make money, decided to lock away the information on Reddit behind a paywall by turning Reddit’s free API to paid, creating quite a mess. In response, thousands of subreddits went dark on Monday, with a plan for most (though not all) to come back today.

But, on Tuesday, Huffman’s internal email to Reddit staff leaked to the Verge, in which Huffman continued with the same dismissive attitude towards Reddit’s users that he showed in last week’s AMA.

There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would.

Elsewhere he notes, again somewhat dismissively, that the subreddits will come back on Wednesday. He also claims only around 1,000 subreddits went dark, but multiple reports show the number was actually closer to 8,000, and that includes many of the most trafficked subreddits like r/funny, r/gaming, r/music, r/science, and r/todayilearned.

One page visualizing the blackouts noted that, of the 500 top subreddits on the site, over 70% either went private or restricted (black is private, brown is restricted).

Perhaps because of Huffman’s dismissive attitude, a bunch of subreddits are saying that they’re no longer planning to reopen today, but will follow r/Music’s lead and stay dark indefinitely:

“Reddit has budged microscopically,” u/SpicyThunder335, a moderator for r/ModCoord, wrote in the post. They say that despite an announcement that access to a popular data-archiving tool for moderators would be restored, “our core concerns still aren’t satisfied, and these concessions came prior to the blackout start date; Reddit has been silent since it began.” SpicyThunder335 also bolded a line from a Monday memo from CEO Steve Huffman obtained by The Verge — “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well” — and said that “more is needed for Reddit to act.”

Ahead of the Tuesday post, more than 300 subreddits had committed to staying dark indefinitely, SpicyThunder335 said. The list included some hugely popular subreddits, like r/aww (more than 34 million subscribers), r/music (more than 32 million subscribers), and r/videos (more than 26 million subscribers). Even r/nba committed to an indefinite timeframe at arguably the most important time of the NBA season. But SpicyThunder335 invited moderators to share pledges to keep the protests going, and the commitments are rolling in.

Now, plenty of subreddits have decided to come back, and I don’t think anyone is begrudging those who did so. But it’s incredible how every time Huffman opens his mouth, he seems to make the situation worse, rather than better.

That’s not leadership. It’s desperation.

Filed Under: api, boycott, steve huffman, subreddits
Companies: reddit

Reddit Blackout Crashes The Site As Reddit Users Realize They’re In The Power Position

from the upvote-the-enshittification dept

On Monday we wrote about the changes that Reddit was making to their API pricing, causing some services to shut down, and leading thousands of subreddits to choose to blackout (some temporarily, some indefinitely). Apparently, all those sites going private resulted in… Reddit itself falling over.

According to Reddit, the blackout was responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge. The company said the outage was fully resolved at 1:28PM ET.

The issues started Monday morning, with Reddit’s status page reporting a “major outage” affecting Reddit’s desktop and mobile sites and its native mobile apps. “We’re aware of problems loading content and are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible,” the company wrote on the status page in a message at 10:58AM ET. At 11:47AM ET, the company said that “we’re observing improvements across the site and expect issue to recover for most users. We will continue to closely monitor the situation.”

That’s… not a good sign for Reddit. The details show that over 8,000 subreddits, with the backing of nearly 29,000 mods have participated in the blackout.

Moderators in r/ModCoord are keeping track of participating subreddits in an ongoing thread — as of Monday afternoon, 28,606 moderators are participating, and 8,300 subreddits pledged to go private in support of the movement. Some subreddits pledged to permanently shut down unless Reddit “adequately addresses” its users’ concerns, according to a post in r/Save3rdPartyApps. The most popular subreddits participating the blackout include r/funny, r/aww, r/gaming, r/Music, r/Pics, r/science and r/todayilearned. The collective userbase across all of the protesting subreddits totals 2.8 billion, which includes a significant overlap of users who subscribe to multiple protesting subreddits. Users can watch subreddits go dark in real time on Twitch.

As numerous people are pointing out, Reddit is discovering the same thing that Twitter is also discovering: when you build a service where the value is all the free content that users provide, you’re going to run into some problems when you suddenly start acting like you “own” all that, and you feel the need to put up paywalls for access.

Sure, it can work in the short term thanks to the sheer inertia of the existing giant audience. But, if we’ve learned anything over the last few decades of the internet, users are mostly okay if they’re asked to put up with some ads here and there in exchange for access to useful information and the wider community itself. But when you start to put up paywalls to access that community and information, including destroying the businesses and services that made your community much more valuable for free, well, at some point those users are going to realize they have the power to go elsewhere.

In many ways this is just yet another example of Cory Doctorow’s enshittification. Remember, the quick synopsis of the enshittification process is:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Reddit was good to its users for many years. But now, as it needs to IPO to keep its investors happy, it’s trying to claw back as much value for itself, and that means taking value away from the users. But the users are the ones who provide all the value.

And this bumps up against another part of Cory’s enshittifcation concept: it only works when switching costs are high. Social media can make that work. But I’m not so sure that Reddit has the sheer gravitational pull that social media has. Yes, there are social media-like communities on various subreddits. But, on the whole, the communities are built around topics, and it’s kind of easy to just move elsewhere (again, fediverse options Lemmy and Kbin are already looking pretty nice for that).

And, Reddit, of all sites, should know this. Because Reddit’s big break was when Digg went through an accelerated enshittification in 2010, with a revamp that was driven by investors at the expense of its users. And Digg’s users quickly decamped for Reddit, which quickly became much bigger, and much more useful, than Digg ever was.

So far, Reddit management still doesn’t seem to recognize what’s happening, and continues to dismiss these concerns. Perhaps users will stick around. Perhaps the alternatives won’t prove compelling enough. But there’s a real opportunity for users to show Reddit management that the value that they’re now trying to capture isn’t about Reddit. It’s about the users.

Filed Under: api, boycott, enshittification, information, open platforms, steve huffman, users
Companies: reddit

Nonprofit Takes Aim At Fox News By Demystifying Ad Exchanges

from the delusion-express dept

Tue, Jun 14th 2022 06:35am - Karl Bode

Usually when people start whining about the propaganda dumpster fire that is Fox News, several things predictably happen. First, somebody with no idea how any of this works will yell out something about how the FCC should ban Fox from doing this (which is unconstitutional), or restore the mythologized Fairness Doctrine (which wouldn’t have applied to cable TV anyway).

That will generally be followed by a lot of First Amendment experts getting healthy Twitter engagement for justly making fun of those people in a variety of new and creative ways.

It’s at that point the conversation usually sputters. Rarely in this process does anybody provide any meaningful, creative solutions about what to actually do about Fox News. When I speak to media scholars and experts I’m routinely amazed by how few creative solutions to the Fox News problem there actually are floating about. It’s an entire, elaborate discourse primarily focused on what’s not possible.

Still, every so often you do see people pop up that are actually trying to do… something. Enter a nonprofit named CheckMyAds, which unveiled a new campaign taking aim at Fox News online ad revenues by pressuring the ad exchanges that routinely fund right wing extremism, COVID denialism, and other harmful gibberish:

“We’re kicking off by focusing on many of the same exchanges we previously contacted over their ties to various insurrectionists,” Claire Atkin, one of the groups’ co-founders, told Gizmodo. She noted that while some of the exchanges—Yahoo is among the group’s targets—cut off ad-dollar access to digital properties from Steve Bannon, they remain tethered to Fox News’s site.

The adtech sector is an intentionally convoluted hellscape of algorithmic confusion, intentionally over-complicated to pre-empt regulation, oversight, or even basic levels of accountability and transparency. There’s just an absolute universe of influencer shit-merchants that have exploited this to rake in millions while spewing conspiratorial gibberish, including Fox.

There’s also a long list of advertisers who rely on this confusion to abdicate their ethical responsibility in terms of their money winding up in the pockets of bottom-dwelling grifters and bigots. The murkiness makes it easier to pretend it’s not happening, and it’s this accountability gap the group hopes to target:

Gizmodo’s Shoshana Wodinsky had a good piece explaining how this maze of accountability dodgeball works in a bit more detail.

Advertising bans haven’t done much to thwart the popularity of white supremacist allies like Tucker Carlson, in part because Fox News is primarily financed by cable subscriber fees it obtains whether users watch the channel or not. Efforts to target this systemic dysfunction have also seen limited results so far.

That’s because there’s no single, easy fix for Fox News. It likely requires a rethink of cable retrans fees, a huge dose of accountability and transparency for adtech markets, education standards that prioritize critical thinking in media consumption (see: Finland), a massive boost in creative funding for real journalism, and (according to media scholars like Victor Pickard) a big boost in public media funding.

This is all difficult to implement in a country that prioritizes wealth accumulation above all else, struggles to fund education or journalism, has long cultivated a nasty strain of anti-intellectualism, and has growing distrust in a Congress that’s too corrupt to function on even the most basic of issues.

Still, given the absolute parade of creative thought and financing we’ve thrown at shitty NFT art alone, you have to think the wealthiest country in the history of the planet could do a hell of a better job finding smart, creative ways to clean up blatant propaganda, even if the deck is likely stacked in bullshit’s favor.

Filed Under: ads, authoritarian, boycott, cable news, cable tv, conspiracy theories, disinformation, fairness doctrine, propaganda, retrans fees
Companies: checkmyads, fox news

The Video Game Blockade Against Russia Begins With Volunteer Companies

from the no-games-for-you! dept

When it comes to Russia’s aggressive war in Ukraine and the world’s response to it, timelines obviously get quite compressed. I’ll admit to being somewhat surprised at how much relative unity there has been in the West’s response to Putin’s attempt to destroy European peace with its invasion of a neighboring country. This isn’t to say that more couldn’t be done, of course, but the cohesive response has been nearly as admirable as the fight the Ukrainian people are putting up against a formidable enemy. On the list of ways the world has responded, it perhaps seems something of a lesser thing that Ukraine called on the video game companies of the world to essentially blockade Russia from its activities. Lesser or not, however, the call was heard and several major players in the video game industry have done as asked.

We’ll start with the larger gaming marketplaces and studios, several of which have voluntarily decided to simply cut the Russian market off from their services.

French mega-publisher Ubisoft became the latest game company to take action against Russian customers Monday morning, telling Bloomberg that it is “suspending its physical and digital sales” in the Russian market. Take-Two announced a similar move earlier in the morning, telling Mashable that it is stopping “new sales, installations, and marketing support” in Russia and Belarus, including purchases made through the Rockstar Game Launcher.

The new announcements come after a flurry of similar actions taken by large game publishers over the weekend. Activision Blizzard announced late Friday that it will be cutting off games sales and offering a two-to-one match on employee contributions to relief organizations operating in Ukraine. Electronic Arts also announced Friday that it is halting Russian game sales, including the sale of virtual currency bundles in its popular games, “while this conflict continues.” That action comes after EA Sports earlier removed all Russian teams from FIFA 22 and NHL 22, mirroring similar moves from international organizations managing those sports.

Before anyone wants to launch into a lecture about how cutting access to video games is far different than parking troops on Russia’s border, you’re missing the point. There is a multilateral squeeze of the Russian citizenry happening through sanctions and voluntary actions being undertaken, of which this gaming embargo is a part. Parts of the world are now actively denying Russia’s citizens access to aspects of global culture. Agree with that as a tactic or not, it’s damn well going to be felt by the very people that at the ultimate level allow Putin to retain power. An end to this madness only happens if Putin himself feels pressure to do so and that can ultimately only come from his own pissed off people. Every little bit helps.

The platform level is getting involved here, as well. GOG was the first marketplace to cut Russia off from the market. Eventually both Microsoft and Epic joined GOG. Then Nintendo did as well, though it appears its hand was forced due to payment processing sanctions. Same goes for Steam. Sony hasn’t said anything publicly at the time of this writing, though some games have already been pulled from the Russian market.

And this has trickled beyond the developer/platform space as well. Esports organizations are also cutting Russia out of the game, so to speak.

On Wednesday, the popular ESL Pro League became the latest to announce it was barring “organizations with apparent ties to the Russian government, including individuals or organizations under alleged or confirmed EU sanctions related to the conflict” from participating in its events. The league stopped short of sanctioning individual players on those teams, though, saying they were “not complicit with this situation” and were welcome to still compete “under a neutral name, without representing their country, organization, or their teams’ sponsors on their clothing or otherwise.”

Now, at least one team has complained that it isn’t sponsored by the Russian state and is being unfairly targeted simply for being Russian… and that’s a complaint worth paying attention to. There’s a fine line to walk here. Those in favor of this blockade and its IRL counterparts do want to squeeze the Russian citizenry and make them feel pain due to their leader’s decision. But we also absolutely need those folks to eventually be on our side.

Still, this is cultural seclusion we’re talking about here. That isn’t to be done lightly, but it’s hard to argue that this sort of collective action doesn’t fit the bill in this case. Now we await the reaction from the Russian public.

Filed Under: blockade, boycott, russia, ukraine, video games
Companies: activision blizzard, ea, epic, esl pro league, gog, microsoft, nintendo, ubisoft, valve

New Boycott In Support Of Open Access: Third Time Lucky?

from the idea-whose-time-has-come dept

Over three years ago, we wrote about a fast-growing boycott of the academic publisher Elsevier, organised in protest at that company’s high prices, its “bundling” of journals into larger collections, and its support for SOPA. Even though over 15,000 people eventually pledged not to work with Elsevier, the company is still going strong, making huge profits from the work of academics, and putting paywalls between the public and knowledge. Perhaps we should have guessed it would end like that. As we noted then, this was not the first or biggest boycott in the history of open access. In 2000, 34,000 scientists from 180 nations signed up to the following:

> we pledge that, beginning in September 2001, we will publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to only those scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original research reports that they have published, through PubMed Central and similar online public resources, within 6 months of their initial publication date.

The failure by many of them to follow through on that promise did have one positive effect: it led to the creation of what remains perhaps the most influential open access publisher, the Public Library of Science, which is still around today, and flourishing. Both of these unsuccessful attempts to use boycotts to push forward open access are mentioned in a post by Dr Danny Kingsley on the Unlocking Research blog, which reports on yet another attempt to use this approach:

> A long running dispute between Dutch universities and Elsevier has taken an interesting turn. Yesterday Koen Becking, chairman of the Executive Board of Tilburg University who has been negotiating with scientific publishers about an open access policy on behalf of Dutch universities with his colleague Gerard Meijer, announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier. > > As a first step in boycotting the publisher, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has asked all scientists that are editor in chief of a journal published by Elsevier to give up their post. If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals.

And here’s why Kingsley thinks this time the boycott might work:

> Typically negotiations with publishers occur at an institutional level and with representatives from the university libraries. This makes sense as libraries have long standing relationships with publishers and understand the minutiae of the licencing processes . However the Dutch negotiations have been led by the Vice Chancellors of the universities. It is a country-wide negotiation at the highest level. And Vice Chancellors have the ability to request behaviour change of their research communities.

That exposes what went wrong with the previous boycotts: they were carried out by the researchers, who have very little clout individually or even collectively when it comes to putting pressure on huge companies like Elsevier. But the Vice Chancellors have real power, based on the ability to instruct their respective institutions how they should — or shouldn’t — act, including, presumably, how they spend their money on journal subscriptions.

The Dutch seem to be serious about making open access the norm in their country. A recent amendment to the country’s copyright act means that authors are now entitled by law to make the results of their research available under open access licenses. As a short notice on the University of Utrecht site explains:

> This means that university staff no longer have to lay down the right to publish open access in agreements with publishers. After the amendment of the law they have and keep this right automatically. With the publisher they only have to reach an agreement on the length of ‘a reasonable period of time’.

Even without the boycott, then, Elsevier will be obliged to agree to release research that is completely or partly paid for by the Dutch government as open access after that “reasonable period of time.” All-in-all, now might be a good moment for the company to take a more accommodating approach to open access than it has in the past.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: academic journals, boycott, journals, open access
Companies: elsevier

Indian Film Industry To Punish Pirates Paying Customers With 3-Month Film Release Boycott

from the baby,-bathwater dept

Tue, Mar 10th 2015 09:22am - Karl Bode

As we’ve noted countless times, diminishing the impact of piracy isn’t exactly rocket science. Give consumers what they want at a reasonable price, and more often than not you’ll be able to minimize piracy’s impact on your business model. But as we’ve seen just as often, that logic is a bridge too far for many entertainment industry executives, who’ve relentlessly instituted all manner of more “creative” solutions to try and retain legacy power in shifting markets. Why give consumers what they want when you can insult, cajole, sue and otherwise harass your paying customers, then blame everything but your own rigid thinking?

The latest ingenious solution comes courtesy of India’s Tamil Film Producer’s Council (TFPC), which is considering a plan to stop releasing movies entirely in the misguided belief that this is going to somehow stop people from pirating. Apparently, the logic goes, if you stop releasing films for three months, the lack of things to pirate (ignoring a century of previous content, of course) will magically stop piracy forever! Ingenious!:

“Piracy will automatically stop when there’s no content. When we stop film releases, say for three months, the movie pirates will go out of business. We are looking into this option because film producers have suffered heavily in the last 24 months,” (said) Kalaipuli S Thanu, TFPC president.”

One, there’s just a blistering amount of hubris involved in believing that you can turn an entire culture’s art creation on and off like some kind of spigot. Like they were scolding a kitten, you’ll recall the RIAA often used to state that if people didn’t stop pirating content, creators would just stop making music — as if the business side of the equation could simply wipe all art creation from the face of the earth. That some still think they can unilaterally stop art creation as a “punishment” for piracy perfectly exemplifies the distorted thinking responsible for the global entertainment industry’s ongoing struggles.

Two, the report notes that just a three-month ban on film production would impact the release of some 36 Indian films, which would then be harmed by the fact that they’d be shoveled in a more crowded release window. In addition to harming content creators, TFPC can’t apparently understand that stopping the release of all films hurts its paying customers. Local filmmaker “Cheran” has a different suggested course of action, involving crazy concepts like modifying release windows and (gasp) lowering prices:

“If original DVD of a new film is available for Rs.50, why would anyone think of buying a pirated copy?” (asked Indian Filmmaker Cheran. “We all know the quality of pirated prints. I’ve sold nearly Rs.10 lakh (or around $16,800) DVDs of my film in the first two days,” he said.”I don’t mind if one person buys and shows it to his entire family. As long as people don’t watch pirated version of any film, I’m happy to release my films on DVD. Most households today have access to digital TV, so new films can be released via direct-to-home medium as well,” he added.”

Hopefully somebody at the TFPC hears Cheran’s outlandish suggestions above the din of indignant entitlement.

Filed Under: boycott, films, india, piracy
Companies: tamil film producer's council, tfpc

Boycott Called Against Spanish Newspaper Publishers' Association Titles In Protest Of New Copyright Law

from the defending-the-glue dept

Last week we reported on the Spanish newspaper publishers’ association (AEDE) begging the Spanish government and EU to stop Google News shutting down as it realizes how much its members depend on Google for traffic to newspaper sites. To bring home just how stupid the new Spanish copyright law is, the online site Hipertextual.com is now calling for a boycott of all titles owned by AEDE (original in Spanish):

> Are you too against the new copyright law and the AEDE tax on media and aggregators? The first step you can take right now is to begin a boycott of AEDE titles: don’t visit them, don’t link to them, don’t give them traffic or relevance.

The Hipertextual.com article also recommends installing add-ons for the Chrome and Firefox browsers that automatically block all links to AEDE titles, and provides lists of international, national and regional alternatives.

Even if it is well supported, the boycott on its own probably wouldn’t have much effect, but combined with the devastating loss of traffic that Google News closing will cause, it will certainly add to the pressure on the AEDE publishers. Just as importantly, it will also show that whatever the Spanish government may think, the country’s new copyright law is not just about squeezing money from a rich US company, but also represents a serious threat to the basic glue that holds the Web together — the hypertext link.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: boycott, google news, publishers, spain
Companies: aede

GoDaddy Boycott Fizzles; Twice As Many Domains Transfer In As Out

from the not-sustainable dept

Yesterday, we noted that it appeared that the “GoDaddy boycott” concept may have been losing steam, thanks to the company’s decision to move away from supporting the bill… combined with a new aggressive advertising campaign. Finally, on Thursday morning, the company went a step further: saying it hadn’t just stopped supporting SOPA but now directly opposed SOPA. Even though the company notes that it saw “a spike in domain name transfers,” it looks like the actual “boycott” day fizzled out. Looking at the results from DailyChanges shows that GoDaddy actually had a strongly positive day, netting 20,748 more domains at the end of the day than the beginning. On transfers alone, there were nearly double the number of transfers in as out (27,843 in to 14,492 out) as well as more new registrations than deleted domains (43,304 new registrations compared to 35,907 deletions).

This isn’t that surprising, really. There was a big burst last week, which is what resulted in GoDaddy changing its stance on the bills. In other words, it seemed like most people jumped to make the move immediately, rather than waiting a week. On top of that, GoDaddy’s change in position very likely did ease the concerns of many. And, many made the quite reasonable argument that continuing the boycott after GoDaddy officially changed positions would be counterproductive, since it would discourage other companies from changing their position as well. Of course, a counter argument would be that the goal of the boycott was less about convincing others on the list to change positions as it was to make sure that no other companies decided to support SOPA or any similar future regulations.

Either way, it appears that for those who were hoping for a big boycott on Thursday, that didn’t happen. I’m sure some SOPA supporters will use this as fodder to suggest the whole effort was a failure, but that’s ridiculous. The whole thing still got a large company that was a huge supporter of these terrible bills to switch its position and recognize that it can’t run roughshod over the wishes of its customers. It also helped draw more attention to the overall issue, and helped in getting other companies to back away from supporting the bill. It also got some attention among elected officials about how supporting this bill could get the internet activated. It may not be enough to kill the bills yet, but more politicians are aware of the issues. All in all, getting GoDaddy to change its position was a huge victory against SOPA and PIPA, but remains just one battle in a long and still ongoing war.

Update: There are a bunch of comments insisting that this can’t be true, and I’m happy to see more data. NameCheap claims that it had 32,000 domains transfer in, and it’s true that Daily Changes isn’t a perfect proxy for domain transfers — but it’s a pretty good one. Some are suggesting that delays in processing will show more transfers over the next few days. We’ll be watching. It’s possible that there were a lot more transfers, but just because people want it to happen, doesn’t mean it actually happened. Update 2: NameCheap says in the last week they’ve received around 80,000 transfers.

Filed Under: boycott, domains, pipa, protect ip, public, sopa
Companies: godaddy

Is A Naked Danica Patrick Working To Quell GoDaddy Boycott Efforts?

from the timing-is-everything dept

Well, today was the day originally scheduled as the GoDaddy boycott day, in which people who had registered domains with GoDaddy were going to transfer them out. With GoDaddy officially dropping support for SOPA, there have been some questions about whether or not that boycott will still happen in significant numbers. There have already been some high profile transfers, such as from the Imgur folks, and there are still plenty of people talking about going through with the boycott as planned.

However, GoDaddy seems to be focusing on what’s worked for it in the past: advertising with scantily clad women (and Danica Patrick in particular). Apparently it’s been putting full page ads in the NY Times (and other papers?) with Patrick covered strategically by a sign.

And… the strategy may have worked so far.

While tons of domains transferred out at the end of last week, this week has been a bit of a different story. On Monday, it looks like GoDaddy basically broke even, with 18,401 new registrations and 14,853 transfers in… vs only 8,862 transfers out and 24,120 domains deleted. That netted out to an increase for GoDaddy of 272 domains. Tuesday was even more positive for the company. Even though another 16,662 domains were transferred out and another 27,564 were deleted, there was a big bump in new registrations: 31,574 (perhaps driven by new ads?) and another 15,452 transferred in. Net change? 2,800 in the plus column for GoDaddy. Finally, that same trend continued for Wednesday: an impressive 33,251 new registrations and 17,549 transfers in. That goes against 15,524 transfers out and 30,634 deletions. Net: 4,642 more domains under GoDaddy control.

Left unanswered: is this a lull before a bunch of transfers today? Or has the whole boycott issue subsided?

Filed Under: advertising, boycott, danica patrick, domains, pipa, protect ip, public, sopa
Companies: godaddy