Summary The EFF is said to believe that no one should be allowed to decide who is able to speak or not. Photo: BBC
(Web Desk) – A US-based digital rights group has said that decisions by Google, GoDaddy and Cloudflare to eject a neo-Nazi site from their services were "dangerous”.
The Daily Stormer – a new-Nazi site had degraded 32-year-old Heather Heyer who lost her life while protesting against a far-right rally in Charlottesville. This led to a reaction following which the website was kicked off by multiple web firms’ server platforms.
Condemning the Daily Stormer’s action earlier, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has now criticised this response.
According to BBC, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has said, "We strongly believe that what GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare did here was dangerous, because internet intermediaries, especially those with few competitors, control so much online speech, the consequences of their decisions have far-reaching impacts on speech around the world".
The EFF is said to believe that no one – including the government and private companies should be allowed to decide who is able to speak or not.
"We wholeheartedly agree with the concerns raised by the EFF. They reflect the same concerns we raised in our blog", said Cloudflare’s Chief Executive Officer Matthew Prince. Prince explained that he made his decision after the Daily Stormer s administrators suggested that Cloudflare supported their cause, reported BBC.
Google and GoDaddy earlier in the week said that they were cancelling the Daily Stormer s registration with Google Domains as it had violated the Tech Giant’s terms of service by posting such content. The Daily Stormer currently is inaccessible over the web, after various domain providers and hosting firms including one from Russia banned it from their services.
Dark web network Tor, in a blog post has said that it doesn’t plan to stop the Daily Stormer from using its technology. "Tor is designed to defend human rights and privacy by preventing anyone from censoring things, even us," the Tor Project explained.
The list of businesses that have shut out the Daily Stormer and other white nationalist websites is growing every day.
Payment giants Mastercard, Visa, Paypal and American Express have told BBC that they will be taking a tough stance on sites that are engaged in illegal activities like Daily Stormer – that provoke hate, racial intolerance or violence. Companies like Google, Deezer and Spotify that offer music streaming services have said they would remove any music that incites violence, hatred or racism.
Spotify told BBC that they are glad to have been alerted to such content and have already removed a number of bands that have been identified, while urgently reviewing the remaining ones.
