Neo-Nazi site Stormfront has been temporarily taken down

The post-Charlottesville removal of neo-Nazi content from various web sources continues to power on as the long-standing website Stormfront has, for now, been taken down. A Whois search shows that Web.com domain provider Network Solutions LLC has put a hold on the website and as the Knoxville News Sentinel reports, the hold prohibits the site from being updated, transferred or deleted. If the domain provider decides to delete Stormfront, any subsequent version hosted elsewhere would have to be recreated from scratch.

The nonprofit group Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law requested the site be taken down, pointing to a clause in Network Solutions' policies that disallows sites on their domains "to display bigotry, discrimination or hatred." The group's executive director, Kristen Clarke, told the Sentinel, "Following our efforts, Network Solutions has pulled the site. And while bringing down one site won't terminate their efforts, it will make it a little more difficult for white supremacists to sow hatred."

Recently, the white supremacist site Daily Stormer lost its GoDaddy web domain and then subsequently lost hosting support and website security from Google, Cloudflare and DigitalOcean. In past weeks, we've also seen Spotify, Google and Deezer take down racist music, Facebook and Reddit ban hate groups, Squarespace shut down bigoted and hateful websites and OkCupid ban a white supremacist from its platform for life.

Some groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have come out against these moves as violations of the principles of free speech, but really, the less Nazi content around, the better.