INeedAttention.com

This morning I found out that RateMyCop.com, a new site that just launched with the purpose of rating police officer’s performance, had been taken down by its hosting provider and registrar GoDaddy. The site launched to mixed reaction, with a sharp contrast between the negative response of law enforcement and mass media and the relief to armchair constitutional scholars posting on Internet message boards. With over 4200 diggs, and nearly 1400 votes on reddit, it’s clear that there’s a public interest in the story here.

As a GoDaddy VPS customer, and amateur tutorial author and reviewer, this upset me, so I wrote a note on GoDaddy’s public relations feedback page.

“As a GoDaddy customer, I am extremely concerned about GoDaddy’s behavior in deleting DNS records for ‘RateMyCop.com’. Continued behavior in this regard will force me to switch to another domain registrar & host.”

This is the sad state of affairs at the moment — other sites have had GoDaddy lay down the law, as extensively documented by NoDaddy, a site about alleged GoDaddy abuses. GoDaddy also notably took down DNS records for computer security site SecLists.org alleging violations of their terms. Similarly, in this case, GoDaddy responded that the user had exceeded its alloted bandwidth, and thus they were cut off for that reason. Here’s their reply:

The situation with the Web site RateMyCop was absolutely NOT about censorship in ANY way.

The site’s operator has publicly disclosed the concerns were over bandwidth. More accurately, Go Daddy’s concerns were about how the RateMyCop site was far exceeding the amount of server usage for which it had contracted.

This customer paid for a shared server plan. The connections to his site were six times more than an entire ‘shared server’ accommodates. While he was paying for a service that cost $14.99 a month, his site actually required a much more extensive set-up.

Basically, he was paying for compact car, when he really needed a semi-truck.

The customer was not willing to work with our staff to resolve the issue.

While the “censorship” allegations certainly make for an edgy “story,” they simply had nothing to do with this situation.

– Go Daddy
Office of the President

I’m inclined not to believe this, since GoDaddy charges for bandwidth overages and would be more than happy to let you pay the overage unless you specify that you want overage protection.

Clearly, the topic of RateMyCop.com is politically charged. Cops don’t like being called out, and historically never have — that’s why they’re cops (so they can call others out). In my community in particular, police criticism isn’t welcomed, after all, we’re the second safest city, and we have great schools, and that’s why our property taxes grew 40 percent and the Palisades Mall’s rose 8 percent, even though the Palisades Mall was supposed to pay lots of taxes to keep our taxes down. Sometimes our police deserve some criticisms despite our incredible performance in arbitrary lists compiled by politicos. It’s only natural to deserve some kind of criticism, nobody is perfect, we understand that, but if we pay high taxes, we deserve high quality service, and that means being held accountable when the law isn’t properly followed.

The Internet has delivered a cornucopia of police abuse videos. More than ever, we are confronted with amateur videos of police brutality and plain old lack of professionalism. Way back in 1992, was one of the most prominent examples of this, with the amateur taping of the Rodney King beating. Without police oversight, guys like like this guy (below), continue indulging themselves and getting high on their own power. Watch as this cop from Baltimore tells a 14 year old that his behavior will get him killed (2:05):

I think GoDaddy needs to step up to the plate, and publicly apologize for any wrong doing, and even if they weren’t wrong, make right on the bandwidth issue — a now highly public issue — by offering the RateMyCop.com authors some massive hosting package for a year. Bob Parsons, a former marine, once fought to protect our freedoms — so it sure would be a shame to see his company do just the opposite.