We all know where this is headed. It’s already happened elsewhere… Western Rifle Shooters was deplatformed and booted from WordPress, Godaddy and Paypal deplatformed Gab.com, and now The Conservative Treehouse has been given until 02 December to find a new host…
One week after the 2020 presidential election, The Conservative Treehouse received the following notification:…”given the incompatibility between your site’s content and our terms, you need to find a new hosting provider and must migrate the site by Wednesday, December 2nd.
If Biden/Harris wins the presidency, chances are this will become far worse… their transition officials already believe the 1st Amendment is too broad and “hate-speech” should be banned.
Web hosting companies are deciding who they will host based upon the content of their site. How long until ICANN starts deciding if a domain name is acceptable? Do you think your site, and therefore your brand is protected? Did you think you actually owned your domain name? You don’t.
Individuals and organizations pay for the use of a domain name and its entries in the domain name system. Registrars pay registry operators for the right to register particular TLDs and they also pay a contribution to ICANN. The system works because of a complex set of agreements between various entities. No one actually owns domain names.
This site has reviews about web hosts that support free speech. I have not vetted this list, but it may be a start.
The only true protection is to host your site on the deep web/dark web, but that brings forth an additional set of complications… who do you trust to host your .onion website? If you set up a .onion address, are you going to bring further unwanted scrutiny upon yourself? An .onion address, accessed only by the TOR browser, is virtually impossible to remember, so you will have to learn to bookmark every site you want to visit.
There are solutions… you can host your .onion site on your own server in your home. This is relatively easy and straightforward. Adding additional protections, such as running the site through a VPN, serving your site in a virtual machine, and using common sense regarding the access to your server are important. I am of the opinion that every site out there should have a backup site that is a mirror of their public site on the dark web with a .onion address. Make that address publicly visible on their main site, so everyone can visit and bookmark the site for that time when the rest of our freedoms start slipping away. This may become the only way we are able to communicate before things get really sporky.
