The impact of the massive protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act a couple of months ago is still being felt. On Friday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that the nonprofit organization"s domain names, including the popular Wikipedia web site, have now been transferred from GoDaddy over to MarkMonitor.
According to the Wikimedia Foundation"s announcement:
We had been deliberating a move from GoDaddy for some time — our legal department felt the company was not the best fit for our domain needs — and we began actively seeking other domain management providers in December 2011.
The Wikimedia Foundation also confirmed that GoDaddy"s initial support of SOPA also helped in their decision to move their domain names. GoDaddy later retracted their support of SOPA after it got hit with a massive Internet protest in December.
Wikipedia"s US web site famously joined with thousands of others on January 18th in going dark for the day to protest SOPA. Their combined actions helped in convincing US legislators to suspend voting on both SOPA and the Protect IP Act indefinitely.
MarkMonitor is a domain name service based in San Francisco. The Wikimedia Foundation says:
The company will help the Foundation consolidate and centralize management of all of its domains, will provide services needed to manage a global domain portfolio and will better protect our domains with additional security features.