Neo-Nazi site kicked off web
BATON ROUGE, La. — A neo-Nazi website’s publisher said Wednesday that he has “effectively been completely banned from the internet” after mocking the victim of a deadly car attack at a white nationalist rally in Virginia.
“Clearly, the powers that be believe that they have the ability to simply kick me off the internet,” Andrew Anglin, who has published the site from an undisclosed location, complained to The Associated Press in an e-mail.
Access to The Daily Stormer had been sporadic since Monday, when Google canceled its domain name registration, making its IP address nearly impossible for internet users to locate. The site had moved its registration to Google after GoDaddy tweeted late Sunday night that it had given The Daily Stormer 24 hours to move its domain to another provider. Google then yanked the address as well, citing a violation of its terms of service.
The site briefly reappeared Wednesday with a Russian domain name and registration and a dubious top story, making the unsupported claim that President Donald Trump had called Russian President Vladimir Putin to get the site restored. The story presented no evidence that Trump or Putin had any involvement in the move and Trump has no known links to the site.
Until mid-day, the site continued to receive performance and security services from San Francisco-based Cloudflare Inc., protecting it from denial of service attacks.
Cloudflare said it is cooperating with law enforcement. A company statement called some of the content on Cloudflare's network “repugnant.” but said withdrawing its services would not remove the website from the internet, just make it slower and more vulnerable to attack.
Shortly thereafter, the site that takes its name from Der Stormer, a newspaper that published Nazi propaganda, disappeared again. Anglin said he was struggling to find a domain registry service whose terms of service allow for the content he produces.
“I have been kicked off of 4 of them so far, and many of them contain explicit references to ‘hate speech’ in their ToS. Others would be incapable of managing the DDoS attacks,” Anglin wrote, expressing frustration with ICANN, the international nonprofit that authorizes domainname registrars. “If they don’t have a single registrar willing to host me, then they have effectively banned me from registering a domain.”
Anglin had been keeping up his inflammatory statements through the Russian domain, mocking Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed when a man remembered for praising Adolph Hitler rammed his car into a crowd of demonstrators in Charlottesville on Saturday. The original story called her, among many other things, “the definition of uselessness.”