Gab, a free speech-orientated social network, has been given five days to change domain services from its provider Asia Registry, who claimed their domain will otherwise be terminated.
In an email, Asia Registry, an Australian company, claimed that the social network violated their “Abuse Policy” and “Australian federal and state anti-discrimination laws, which prohibit public vilification on the basis of race, religion, or ethnic origin.”
“Asia Registry’s Abuse Policy specifically prohibits use of a domain name in a manner that is discriminatory or hateful,” they continued, before warning Gab: “Asia Registry will cancel your domain name registration” if they don’t find another provider within five days.
https://twitter.com/getongab/status/909646893516414977
In an email to Breitbart Tech, Gab CEO Andrew Torba claimed, “We have not heard back from Asia Registry.”
“We are in the process of transferring to another registry, but unfortunately need to hear back from Asia Registry first to do so,” he continued. “We have also secured numerous alternative domains in the event that our domain is seized.”
“This action from Asia Registry, just days after our lawsuit with Google was filed, is unprecedented. We have acted in good faith with Asia Registry and had no problems up until we raised our funding round and launched our lawsuit against Google,” he concluded. “This exemplifies the need for a decentralized domain registrar solution. ICANN being handed off to the EU was the most devastating blow to the free and open internet of our generation. The Obama Administration and our Congress should be ashamed. This should be a big wakeup call for engineers to start building pro-free speech alternative technology infrastructure solutions.”
In August, domain service GoDaddy gave neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer 24 hours to move to a different provider, prompting them to briefly move to Google, where the company then seized the website’s domain.
The website was also suspended from Cloudflare, a company that refused to crackdown on ISIS sites in 2015 over censorship concerns, forcing The Daily Stormer to move to the dark web.
In a statement, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince claimed, “I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the internet,” admitting,”No one should have that power.”
Following the incident, both former Breitbart Senior Editor Milo Yiannopoulos and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) condemned the censorship.
In a statement, the EFF claimed any censorship tactics used against neo-Nazis “will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with,” while Milo warned “next time it might not be white supremacists, next time it might be just regular right-wingers, next time it might be perfectly respectable, reasonable people.”
Last week, Gab filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Google after the company banned Gab from their Google Play Store.
The social network, which boasts itself as a platform for everyone and recently raised over $1 million in public investment, was suddenly suspended and removed from Google Play for “hate speech,” despite the fact that it had been available on the platform for several months.
Apple has also repeatedly banned Gab from the Apple App Store for refusing to censor its users unless they break any laws.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington and Gab @Nash, or like his page at Facebook.
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