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Namecheap: Russia Service Termination

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Re: Namecheap: Russia Service Termination

#611
post #489

Here my two cents as someone that has visited, lived in, or good friends in authoritarian regimes such as East Germany, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Hong Kong: - in a democracy, the population is responsible for what the government does. Conversely, the more authoritarian the regime, arguably the less culpable the population is. (Of course, people shouldn't have allowed an authoritarian figure to gain power... indeed.…

You highlight the difference well between a democracy and an authoritarian regime. However the suggestion you make at the end, that we should only sanction Putin & co., is exactly the type of measure that would work in a democratic regime but not in an authoritarian one. I can't think of a single case where a large authoritarian regime was handed off gently to a democratic one as a result of sanctions on the dictator…

Can you think of a case where sanctions have produced the desired effect of the regime change?

I live in Serbia which was under heavy sanctions in early 90s: those in power have only gotten richer and more powerful during the time. Only after economy started recovering in late 90s, and people could afford to worry about "freedom" instead of basic survival did people get enough democratic momentum to vote incumbents out (sprinkled with a bit of West-supported protests to avoid a possibly rigged second round with 47% votes for opposition to 32% for incumbents in the first round iirc).

But sanctions did nothing to hurt those in power. They did plenty to hurt the rest of us.

Re: Namecheap: Russia Service Termination

#612

We haven't blocked the domains, we are asking people to move. There are plenty of other choices out there when it comes to infrastructure services so this isn't "deplatforming". I sympathize with people that are not pro regime but ultimately even those tax dollars they may generate go to the regime. We have people on the ground in Ukraine being bombarded now non stop. I cannot with good conscience continue to support…

No post body was provided.

Re: Namecheap: Russia Service Termination

#615

It may interest you to know that Namecheap, just a few days ago, banned a few domain names purely based on an ambiguous tweet that got 8 likes , that didn't even ask for those domains to be banned or cite any ToS violation. https://twitter.com/Namecheap/status/1489485337885921284 Namecheap then reverted that decision when they got ratioed (with no tweets supporting their decision). I've never heard of these domain na…

––– Twitter Conversation ––– [Twitter User A] Can anyone explain to me what the @UoT_Foundation is? [Twitter User B] Track the wallets. Where do they go? They all sound like pretty catchy marketing names to me [...] All registered on Namecheap within 5 days of each other. All from Iceland (IS). Two of them using pretty much the exact same AWS nameservers. Hmmm. This isn't even tracking wallets. [Namecheap.com] Hello!…

Thor project is run by scammers. Good move NC

Re: Namecheap: Russia Service Termination

#616

We haven't blocked the domains, we are asking people to move. There are plenty of other choices out there when it comes to infrastructure services so this isn't "deplatforming". I sympathize with people that are not pro regime but ultimately even those tax dollars they may generate go to the regime. We have people on the ground in Ukraine being bombarded now non stop. I cannot with good conscience continue to support…

Will you also block countries that use their tax dollars to arrest and kill LGBT people? Or countries that are involved in other unjust wars?

It's fine if you do, but this wording reads like cringy bandwagoning. I highly doubt you won't immediately revert all this and try courting those customers again if this war gets resolved but Putin somehow stays in power. Just go with a "sorry dudes but your president is doing bad stuff and we're making a temporary move here. Sorry" sort of statement.

Re: Namecheap: Russia Service Termination

#617

We haven't blocked the domains, we are asking people to move. There are plenty of other choices out there when it comes to infrastructure services so this isn't "deplatforming". I sympathize with people that are not pro regime but ultimately even those tax dollars they may generate go to the regime. We have people on the ground in Ukraine being bombarded now non stop. I cannot with good conscience continue to support…

> committing war crimes against innocent people

does not sound like a right reason for your actions. Because with this, there are a bunch of other countries you should be suspending your services for. US, Israel, India off the top my head and you might want to include some Arabic countries to the list.

> people on the ground in Ukraine being bombarded

makes your reasons legitimate though as you probably don't have people in other countries as victims of war crimes.

Re: Namecheap: Russia Service Termination

#618

We haven't blocked the domains, we are asking people to move. There are plenty of other choices out there when it comes to infrastructure services so this isn't "deplatforming". I sympathize with people that are not pro regime but ultimately even those tax dollars they may generate go to the regime. We have people on the ground in Ukraine being bombarded now non stop. I cannot with good conscience continue to support…

As a namecheap customer (or addict to registering names for things I may do in the future.... ) I appreciate this, and appreciate the flexibility for those with special circumstances. While this is a headache for innocent Russian bystanders caught up in this war, the response by the majority of the world needs to be overwhelming.

Re: Namecheap: Russia Service Termination

#619

I'm not in Russia and I don't really care about this war (sorry, just being honest!) but this isn't the kind of internet I want, where companies show their virtue by taking political positions and removing service from their customers (looking at you AWS). The domain and e-mail service that I paid money for shouldn't be contingent on my government behaving and continuing to behave in a manor that Namecheap approves o…

[deleted]

Re: Namecheap: Russia Service Termination

#620

We haven't blocked the domains, we are asking people to move. There are plenty of other choices out there when it comes to infrastructure services so this isn't "deplatforming". I sympathize with people that are not pro regime but ultimately even those tax dollars they may generate go to the regime. We have people on the ground in Ukraine being bombarded now non stop. I cannot with good conscience continue to support…

Selective collective punishment is a really bad way to treat customers.

Russians are out in the streets protesting and even Russian oligarchs are speaking out. Apparently that doesn't mean anything to Namecheap though, they're all guilty. This is really a PR move, nothing more.

As others have highlighted, providing services to any American supports war crimes, if we go by their logic. No one should be doing anything like this unless they are trying to comply with sanctions. Which, as far as I know, are only currently targeting senior Russian officials. Even then, sanctions tend to hurt everyday people more than the regimes they're trying to target. Does anyone really think that people in an authoritarian country can control what their leader does? This is the same mindset that lead to the Japanese internment camps in WWII, just a difference in degree.

Even though I've been a happy Namecheap customer for years and have recommended them to others, this is extremely troubling and I'm going to look at migrating my own domains from Namecheap. Bonus points for being too cowardly to advertise this on your site.

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