Greenpeace recently put up a parody campaign site to highlight the damages on rain forest caused by the oil palm plantations of Neste Oil. The oil company retaliated by suing Greenpeace’s domain registrar, Loopia, for copyright infringement.
Crazy and lame, I know…
But what is really insane is how Loopia just folded to Neste Oil. They shut down the environmental campaign site without any court ruling what so ever. A cowardly decision to censor their own customer.
This made me upset and so I went looking for more stories on Loopia, to see if this was a habit. Turns out it is a recent fad of theirs.
In 2007 a right wing extremist site was born in Sweden, with the purpose of building a register of swedish jews and communists. Guess which free-speech loving domain registrar got the nazis covered on the DNS department? Yes, Loopia! For some reason however the site got to stay open that time.
I do not want to support a supplier like that and so I will take Pelle Wessman’s words to heart and vote with my money. Currently I have 57 domains with Loopia and at around 100 SEK per year and domain, this sums up to roughly €635 in annual fees. Which they will no longer receive.
Perhaps not a lot for Loopia, but for me it is. And by doing this I get to tell them this is not alright. Not by far.