Why the alt-right can’t build an alt-internet
After the August 12th hate rally in Charlottesville, online platforms that have long tolerated or ignored white supremacists are very publicly kicking them off. The crackdown spans a broad range of sites and apps, some of which are household names, like Uber, Facebook, and Spotify. But some of the most notable companies to purge their ranks are those we don’t often consider: the web hosts, domain registrars, and other services that you need to put a website on the internet. Over the past week, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, and Google — to name a few — have been playing hot potato with the major neo-Nazi news site Daily Stormer, taking it offline several times as it’s moved around the internet.
After being booted from Namecheap over the weekend,...