For years, the website Daily Stormer has promoted hatred against Jews, black people, LGBT people, and other minorities, making it one of the Internet's most infamous destinations. But on Sunday, editor Andrew Anglin outdid himself by publishing a vulgar, slut-shaming article about Heather Heyer, a woman who was killed when someone rammed a car into a crowd of anti-racism protestors in Charlottesville.

The article prompted a response from the site's domain registrar, GoDaddy. "We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service," GoDaddy wrote in a tweet late Sunday night.

On Monday, the Daily Stormer switched its registration to Google's domain service. Within hours, Google announced a cancellation of its own. "We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service," the company wrote in an statement emailed to Ars.

We don't know where the Daily Stormer will go next, but the odds of the site going offline permanently are slim.

GoDaddy appears to have flip-flopped on the Daily Stormer

A lot of outlets covering this controversy described GoDaddy, somewhat misleadingly, as the Daily Stormer's hosting provider. But GoDaddy wasn't storing or distributing the content on the Daily Stormer website. It was the Daily Stormer's registrar, which is the company that handles registration of "dailystormer.com" in the domain name system, the global database that connects domain names like "arstechnica.com" to numeric IP addresses.

GoDaddy has faced pressure for months from anti-racist groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League to drop the Daily Stormer as a customer. But until this weekend, GoDaddy resisted that pressure.

"GoDaddy doesn't host The Daily Stormer's content on its servers," the investigative site Reveal reported in May. "Because it provides only the domain name, the company says it has a higher standard for terminating service."

"We need to evaluate what level of effect we can actually have on the abuse that's actually going on," said Ben Butler, director of GoDaddy’s digital crimes unit, in a May interview with Reveal. "As a domain name registrar, if we take the domain name down, that domain name stops working. But the content is still out there, live on a server connected to the Internet that can be reached via an IP address or forwarded from another domain name. The actual content is not something we can touch by turning on or off the domain name service."

But GoDaddy abruptly changed its stance on Sunday evening. What changed GoDaddy's mind? In a statement to Techcrunch, GoDaddy said: "given this latest article comes on the immediate heels of a violent act, we believe this type of article could incite additional violence, which violates our terms of service."

But that justification doesn't make much sense to First Amendment lawyer Ken White, who runs the popular Popehat blog.

White describes the Daily Stormer as a "sewer of humanity." In a statement to Ars, he argued that the article about Heyer "is repulsive, and arguably advocates for killing people in general, but it's not actionable incitement under the law. GoDaddy, of course, can kick Nazis off its platform as it likes, though."

James Grimmelmann, an Internet law expert at Cornell University, didn't find GoDaddy's explanation very convincing either. He noted that the Daily Stormer has posted equally inflammatory content for years.

"It's rare for companies in these kinds of suspension disputes to be honest to own up to the fact that 'we tolerated this for years but now we've concluded we were wrong,'" he said. Admitting that you've changed your mind can be awkward. So often companies choose instead to use dubious interpretations of their own rules to insist they haven't changed at all.

Domain name censorship isn’t very effective

On Monday, the Daily Stormer complied with GoDaddy's demand and switched its registration from GoDaddy to Google's domain registration service. This domain transfer process was so seamless that readers of the Daily Stormer probably didn't notice the transfer.

But the reprieve was short-lived. Within hours, Google announced that it, too, didn't want the Daily Stormer's business.

The GoDaddy precedent bothers Milton Mueller, a public policy professor at Georgia Tech. "As much as I hate the Daily Stormer and I think this attack on this murdered person is disgusting, the idea that you go after the domain to shut them down makes me uneasy," Mueller told Ars in a Monday interview. "It seems to be essentially a de facto form of hate-speech regulation."

In practice, taking down a website is very difficult if its owner is determined to keep it online. Grimmelmann points to the saga of Wikileaks, which has faced numerous efforts to take down its wikileaks.org domain over the last decade.

In 2010, Wikileaks' domain name provider took down the wikileaks.org site. The organization responded by registering wikileaks.ch (Switzerland), wikileaks.at (Austria), and wikileaks.cc (the Cocos Islands).

Within two weeks, however, the site was back online at the wikileaks.org domain.