The consumer speaks....

It would seem that the American Consumer is lashing out at the supporters of SOPA.  I just read this post on 'Whats hot on Google+'  I think it says it all:

"I just got a call from #GoDaddy. The rep said he noticed that I'd transferred my 60+ domains away (I've still got a few there that I'm working on transferring, but am being conservative with, since I can't afford any downtime at all with them), and wanted to know if I'd tell them why. I got to tell them that it was because of their #SOPA support, and that I couldn't in good conscience give my money to a tech company that would support legislation like that. I told him I was aware that they had reversed their position, but that their explicit support of it in the first place had cost them my confidence in them, as it is at the best viciously ignorant, and at worst, malicious. The rep was quite sincere in his apology to me, asked if there was anything they could do to win me back. He had a "We support IP protections, and now realize that support of SOPA is too broad" song-and-dance routine that probably came in from a PR memo today. I told him "no thanks", and that was that. I'm impressed by the customer service hustle, but it shows that this little incident really spooked them.

I think that the backlash against their support was a lot more swift and severe than they'd anticipated. Their initially glib "lol, whatever" response was replaced by "oh god, please stop punching us in the quarterly financial report!" real fast.

I feel really bad for the customer service reps that have to do damage control on this. You know that they're going to be pulling overtime this Christmas weekend because their bosses screwed up. The guy I spoke to was professional, but you could tell that he'd made a lot of very similar calls today. He didn't even try to sell me, just sort of accepted it with a "Yup, I hear you, and we're sorry, let us know if we can do anything to get you back". Doesn't change my stance, though.This is fantastic news on the anti-SOPA front, though. This has demonstrated that we, as consumers, can have an impact where it counts. This legislation is funded and driven by corporate interests, and demonstrating that we are able and willing to impact corporate bottom lines if they support legislation like this sends a very clear message. GoDaddy capitulating is a huge win, because it's the first stone to come out of the wall. Now that GoDaddy has demonstrated that they were taking too much damage to continue with their support of SOPA, it empowers people to exert similar pressure on other companies, and it demonstrates to those companies that there are enough angry people out there that you need to listen up and pay attention."

Credit goes to Chris Heald.  This is his post.  You can read it on his Google+ profile

I then read some of the comments on his post.  I won't reprint them here but one of those posts came from GoDaddy's competition.  Again an example of American Capitalism at work:

"Unlike the competition, we oppose SOPA because we believe in internet freedom. Transfer your domains over for $6.99 with code SOPASucks. Offer valid for COM NET ORG INFO and BIZ TLDs."

This was posted in a comment and came directly from Namecheap's Facebook page.


You can read how GoDaddy has pulled their support.


UPDATE:  Who supports SOPA