The Daily Stormer’s days on an Icelandic web address appear to be numbered after the infamous neo-Nazi website disappeared Friday from its latest domain.
The notorious white supremacist site could no longer be reached Friday afternoon at its most recent web address, dailystormer.is, hours after the Reykjavík Grapevine reported that ISNIC, the company that oversees dot-is domains, intended to give it the boot.
Jens Pétur Jensen, the firm’s CEO, told The Grapevine that ISNIC planned to punt The Stormer unless its publisher, Andrew Anglin, provided proof of identity and his address.
“Our terms of service are very clear,” Mr. Jensen said. “All registrants must provide proof of who they are, and where they are physically located. [Mr. Anglin] doesn’t want to do that.”
The website’s publisher didn’t want to provide information because he correctly assumed it would given to law enforcement, Mr. Jensen said, according to told the newspaper.
Mr. Anglin, 32, did not immediately return emails seeking Friday concerning his website, but said on social media that he was “trying to get this fixed.”
Mr. Anglin previously told The Washington Times that the request for personal information was arbitrary and that ISNIC never sought the same details from the administrators of a now-defunct Islamic State site that used an Icelandic web address and instead relied on federal lawmakers to shut down the site.
“This is specifically trying to get me on a technicality so as to try to avoid the fact that otherwise they’re going to need a parliamentary decree, which is going to look really weird, since my site is not illegal in the U.S. and the registration is not illegal in Iceland,” Mr. Anglin told The Washington Times earlier this month. “No registration is illegal in Iceland, which is why they had to have the special decree for the ISIS site, but they were able to get that because the site itself was illegal,” he said, using an alternative name for the terror group.
Mr. Jensen previously said that he asked national police if The Daily Stormer’s content violated Icelandic law barring the dissemination of speech that ridicules, slanders, insults or threatens individuals or groups on account of their race or religion, but added that he would take action regardless unless its publisher provided proof of his identity.
Neither ISNIC nor Icelandic police responded to requests for comment Friday.
The Daily Stormer was launched in 2013 and typically publishes racist and anti-Semitic commentary about news and current events. A version of the site accessible on the dark web Friday carried articles on its homepage with headlines including “Jews Officially Handing America Back to the Americans” and “Black Savage Tries to Kill White Woman Who Let Him Stay with Her.”
The site was originally reachable through a traditional web address, dailystormer.com, but was booted off that domain last month after Mr. Anglin made waves for publishing a crude article lambasting Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal who died Aug. 12 while protesting white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia.
It’s relaunched at a handful of domain names in the interim but has been booted each time by either registrars or regulators driving an ongoing game of neo-Nazi whack-a-mole, and was notably blacklisted last month by tech companies GoDaddy, Google and CloudFlare in addition to government censors in Albania and Russia, among others.
The Daily Stormer’s actual content is hosted on data servers safeguarded by a Seattle-based tech firm whose own previously told The Washington Times that it was protecting the site as a means of preserving its freedom of speech.
Mr. Anglin has previously described his website and internet persona as “performance art.” He’s currently being sued by Montana real estate agent Tanya Gersh and radio host Dean Obeidallah in connection with the content of articles he published prior to Heyer’s death.
• Editor’s note: An previous version of this story incorrectly identified ISNIC as a domain name registrar. ISNIC manages and operates the registry and infrastructure associated with dot-is domains.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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