In order to resolve the issue, they asked us to contact the officer in charge at U. They have told us the domain name was suspended as part of an ongoing law enforcement investigation. They have disabled the DNS without any prior notice or request. has been suspended by Godaddy for more than 24 hours now. I?d like to thank you all for your sympathy. Wow, and here’s the super helpful response from the investigating agency.įounder of JotForm here. com if the US government might kill your business with no explanation at any moment?įiled Under: domains, secondary liability, seizures, suspension, us government Everyone is so busy working and building a company - but something like this means suddenly all of their time has to switch over to help all of those upset customers (and doing so without being able to use the site that everyone will go look at first!).Īctivities like this will chill innovation and entrepreneurship in the US. If you’ve never worked for a startup, perhaps you can’t imagine just how insanely disruptive and destructive such a situation can be. It looks like the US government asked, and GoDaddy just took away the domain. JotForm has been filling its Twitter feed with customer service attempts at helping upset customers, and making it clear it has no information on why the. And the damage here for a small business is massive.
As JotForm notes, it’s important to recognize that the US government already believes it has these powers. It’s this kind of overly broad censorship (and, yes, this is clear censorship) that is what people were afraid of under SOPA. Even if the forms were being used for some illegal purpose (and it’s important to note that Section 230 does not apply to criminal activity - just civil offenses), I still can’t fathom a reason why it should lead to everyone else getting censored and an internet startup facing a massive hardship wherein tons of users have had their service disrupted with millions of useful forms being suddenly disappeared.Īnd I won’t even bother spending any time on the fact that apparently it was GoDaddy who helped the US government “suspend” the domain.įor a government that insists it’s trying to help small businesses and startups, to go and disrupt one and all of its users over some possible illegal usage by a small number of users is just crazy. I’m at a loss as to how this possibly makes sense. This can happen to any web site that allows user generated content. It is not possible for us to manually review all forms. All they have to do is to ask GoDaddy to take a site down. SOPA may not have passed, but what happened shows that it is already being practiced. This can happen to any site that allows public to post content. Many people on the comments assumed the content was posted by us. The website, which allows individuals to create their own forms easily, has had its main domain, “suspended” by the US government, due to “an ongoing investigation.” Because of this JotForm is forcing all of its users to change their forms to use their. But there are some loopholes where technically there are no official safe harbors (though common sense says you still shouldn’t be liable). This is the core purpose behind Section 230 of the CDA (and, to a lesser extent) the DMCA’s safe harbors. That is, if you set up a website where users can post stuff, the people who post stuff are liable for the content - not you as the service provider in the middle.
One of the key principles behind the growth of the internet was belief in protection against secondary liability claims. Thu, Feb 16th 2012 07:40am - Mike Masnick