The Daily Stormer’s DNS has been, as Ars Technica first noted in 2019, “spread over a large number of individual IP addresses, all of which are served from China.”Ī Whois search shows that the domain name used by the Daily Stormer was registered through the company Eranet International Limited, a Guangdong-based company that was established in 2000 and incorporated in Hong Kong in 2005 under, Inc.

A DNS is a service that maps the string of numbers that make up an IP address into human-friendly domain names like (kind of like a phonebook for the internet). It’s a path that Parler is starting to head down now, courtesy of the Russian-owned website protection company DDoS-Guard.Ī key part of the Daily Stormer’s strategy has been to get its DNS service from China. Their ultimate aim is to create websites that are not dependent on services from mainstream web hosting and website protection companies, making it difficult for them to be knocked offline. The Daily Stormer, as well as other extremist, white nationalist platforms, have forged a path back onto the internet that relies on a dwindling number of holdouts-free speech absolutists in the West but also, crucially, shady opportunists in China and Russia. The role of platforms at the top of this technical “stack” such as Facebook and Twitter in failing to moderate speech is well established, but it’s only recently that some of these subterranean services have been forced to recognize that keeping toxic websites afloat is not a neutral act. Keeping a website online requires the cooperation of a long list of often invisible services including transit providers, web hosting and content delivery networks, authoritative and recursive domain name system (DNS) providers, domain registrars, registries, and internet service providers.

Anglin had used the website to praise the death of counterprotester Heather Heyer, prompting a number of organizations including website infrastructure provider Cloudflare to terminate its services, taking it (briefly) offline. His noxious website was hounded off the web in the aftermath of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. That both have seemingly become safe harbors for extremist Western content reflects a disturbing and growing alliance between the far-right and authoritarian governments.Īnglin would know. China, in particular, operates the most extensive and sophisticated censorship apparatus the world has ever seen. “There is no internet company that will support your freedom of speech if the media says you shouldn’t have freedom of speech that is not either Chinese or Russian.”īoth China and Russia are highly adept at censoring any information they deem unacceptable.

“I just want to make this 100% clear,” Andrew Anglin wrote on the Daily Stormer soon after Parler was taken down. President Donald Trump and conspiracy theorists deemed too extreme for Twitter and Facebook, became inaccessible after it was banned from Google and Apple’s app stores and then by Amazon’s hosting services for failing to curb violent and threatening content on its platform during the insurrectionist riots at the U.S. Parler, which had become a refuge for those supporters of U.S. The founder of neo-Nazi rag the Daily Stormer had some advice for the people who ran Parler, after the app was purged from the internet last week: Ask China or Russia for help.

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