The Daily Stormer Shafted By .Wang
The neo-Nazi hub has faced difficulty maintaining a consistent web presence after losing stamina in its battle against several domain hosts.
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
In terms of domain hosting, neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer is having a hard time keeping it up.
The neo-Nazi hub, which has been banned by prominent domain hosting companies Google and GoDaddy since Saturday’s terror attack that killed an anti-racism protester, experienced another setback on Wednesday when their new web address, dailystormer.wang, was blocked by another domain provider.
GoDaddy refused privacy services to The Daily Stormer on Monday. Google quickly banned the site from using its domain registrar just hours later, forcing the hate site to move to the dark web.
On Tuesday, the site reappeared with little fanfare at dailystormer.wang, but its domain registrar, 101Domain, told The Daily Beast it quickly removed the site after several complaints.
“Our abuse team received complaints alleging the site violated our terms and conditions that each customer must agree to secure a domain registration,” Aaron S. Guile, the corporate counsel for 101domain, told The Daily Beast.
“After conducting an internal investigation into the content of the website, our legal and abuse team determined dailystormer.wang did in fact violate our terms and conditions for domain registration.”
The domain company’s terms of service explicitly forbids disseminating “illegal, hateful, harmful, violent, racially or ethnically intolerant, abusive, obscene, pornographic, defamatory, harassing, [or] malicious” content.
The Daily Stormer uses “the most genocidal Republican website” as its slogan and spent the 48 hours after Saturday’s terror attack in Charlottesville insulting Heather Heyer, the woman struck and killed by 20-year-old white supremacist rallygoer James Alex Fields Jr.’s car.
By Wednesday, The Daily Stormer had moved to dailystormer.ru, the suffix for Russian government websites. According to registrar records, dailystormer.ru’s nameserver is Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based company.
Shortly before 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Daily Stormer contributor Weev claimed Cloudflare had cut off any services to Daily Stormer. The site was unreachable at press time.
Cloudflare clarified to Quartz yesterday that it finds “some of these (neo-Nazi) sites repugnant” and is “cooperating with law enforcement in any investigation,” but didn’t specify which investigation.
“Cloudflare is not the host of any website. Cloudflare is a network that provides performance and security services to more than 10% of all Internet requests,” the statement reads. “Cloudflare terminating any user would not remove their content from the Internet, it would simply make a site slower and more vulnerable to attack.”
.Wang was launched by private Chinese domain registrar Zodiac in April of 2014, in part because, when said aloud, it can mean both “king” and “web” or “net” in Mandarin.