Web hosting provider Dreamhost is fighting a Dept of Justice order to release broad-ranging data about visitors to a website that organized protest rallies in Washington DC on January 20, 2017. That was Trumps inauguration day, and saw large protests, which the Dept. of Justice's Search Warrant called riots, against Donald Trump. The information demanded by the DoJ is "highly untargeted" and includes visitor IP addresses, along with contact information, email content, and photos of thousands of people. According to Dreamhost, the web hosting provider, the DoJ's search warrant is an attack on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of association.

Last weekend a protest by NEO-Nazi white supremacists in Charlottesville Virginia was intended to "protect" a statue of Civil War leader Robert E. Lee. That protest turned very violent, including an incident of a car used as a battering ram to drive into a crowd of peaceful anti-fascist protesters, killing one and injuring dozens of other people. In the wake of that protest the Daily Stormer website, billed as the most Genocidal website on the planet, has taken offline by web hosting provider GoDaddy over Terms of Service violations. Reportedly the Daily Stormer's staff has tried to shift web hosting to other providers, but has yet to find an agreeable hosting provider. Seems that publishing a website encouraging people to violence is against the terms of service.

What's common from these extreme ends of the political spectrum is the role the web hosting provider plays in implementing our right to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of association.

Any group denied the ability to host a website cannot speak their message to the world. Guaranteeing freedom of Speech and the other freedoms means guaranteeing that freedom for everyone, including those with whom you disagree.

A week ago a hate-filled group of fascist KKK nazi protesters descended on Charlottesville Virginia, supposedly to protect the existence of a Robert E. Lee statue. That statue is one of many commemorating "hero's" on the losing side of the Civil War, Robert E. Lee being a famous General in the Confederate Army. Why do we even have statues commemorating figures from the Confederacy? In the early 1900's a group of people seeking a revisionist reframing of Civil War history got these statues installed. So when a KKK fascist nazi white supremacist group takes to the street to protect such a statue, they're not acting to preserve history but to continue whitewashing history.

In any case -- the Daily Stormer website actively promotes the KKK/fascist/white supremacist cause, and was deeply involved in promoting the protest rally last weekend. Since then, the Daily Stormer's domain registration has been canceled, and they've lost several other important services from at least Cloud Flare, Google and Zoho. For awhile the Daily Stormer website was available only through the Dark Web, and later it had a .ru domain (Russia), and then they registered a .lol domain. But now their new registrar, Namecheap, has canceled that domain registration.

Namecheap's CEO, Richard Kirkendall, wrote a long blog post about his decision. In it he says that no Domain Registrar should be making such a decision but that even though he recognizes there will be a strong backlash against Namecheap that he feels he made the right decision. That's because while the Daily Stormer website deserves as much free speech protection as the next guy, free speech protections should stop when there's an incitement to violence. The content of the Daily Stormer website is clearly aimed at increasing violence and hatred and inciting violence.