(This story was updated at 12:42 p.m. and may be updated again)
[B]URLINGTON — The parent company of a company bidding to purchase Burlington Telecom is the domain registrar for the neo-Nazi website Stormfront, which came back online Friday.
Stormfront was forced offline by its previous domain registrar, Network Solutions, in late August for violating its terms of service — a move that followed the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The website proclaims, “We are the voice of the new white minority.”
The site’s domain is now registered by Toronto-based Tucows (NASDAQ:TCX) through the third-party reseller WSMDomains. Tucows is the parent company of Ting, a mobile phone and fiber internet service provider, which is among three finalists looking to purchase Burlington Telecom.
Internet companies are under increasing public pressure to deny service to groups that promote hate speech but are under no legal obligation to do so.
Tucows CEO Elliot Noss said domain registration is a “fundamental protocol” on the internet, part of its basic infrastructure, and website content issues should be addressed by the hosting company or the reseller before a registrar considers taking action.
“I’m comfortable saying we object to the content more than most. That makes these issues even more difficult,” Noss said.
Domain registration services are akin to provisioning a network where common carriage should apply, and it’s important that such platforms are neutral to content as a matter of policy, Noss said.
To deny Stormfront access to Tucows’ domain registration services would be the equivalent of a phone company cutting its service, or a municipality telling them they can’t use public roadways, he said.
“The great irony, in the Burlington context, is this is a net neutrality issue,” Noss said.
Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers should not favor certain websites or applications over others, and its among the criteria that city residents asked officials to consider in the Burlington Telecom sale.
Noss said Tucows’ communication with the reseller and the hosting company is “a live issue” and declined to go into greater detail.
Tucows, Network Solutions and Cloudflare, which offers websites protection from distributed denial of service attacks, have all previously cut off services to hate sites in the face of public pressure.
In August, Tucows announced it would stop providing domain privacy protection services to the Daily Stormer, another neo-Nazi website that gained local attention when the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Hate Map” marked a Burlington message board.
Noss said domain privacy services go beyond the infrastructure-level of the internet, as does Tucows’ smaller web hosting service, and therefore a different set of content filters apply.
