GoDaddy Takes Online Security Very Seriously, CEO Says

There was an error in one of Amazon's systems whereby sensitive documents from GoDaddy were in the Amazon cloud and available to the public for a certain period of time. What exactly happened here?

An Amazon employee loaded up some of GoDaddy's information about our own products, and for a brief period of time, that information was exposed. Now, at no point in time was any individual customer information or any of their sensitive PII information exposed to the public. It was more sensitive information between GoDaddy and Amazon. Amazon apologized and fixed the error, and, you know, we got on to business.

Does it concern you as, you know, obviously you're responsible for a lot of customer data, and increasingly all of it is in the cloud?

Yes, absolutely. I mean, anybody who's doing anything in technology now should be concerned about it. The nice thing and one of the things that we do for our customers is protect their information. We help people get their ideas up online, present them to the world, and security is a big part of that. And it's something that we take really seriously.

GoDaddy made headlines a couple of years ago when you banned the Daily Stormer website, a white supremacist website. You know, these are issues that are continuing to come back into focus, especially as Facebook and Twitter deal with, you know, this whole issue of hate speech versus free speech. How has your thinking on that evolved given the vast diversity of websites which you host?

Yeah. So first, we absolutely support the free and open internet and absolutely believe in the free expression of ideas. Now, our terms of service and our policy is when content crosses the line between, frankly, something that might offend us into the line of directly promoting or inciting violence, a particular group will act. We've got pretty sophisticated teams and processes for looking at content. And when it crosses the line into directly threatening violence, we'll act. And that happens on very, very rare occasions, kind of like Daily Stormer.

So you're proactively looking for this kind of content, not just waiting for law enforcement to flag it?

We will take flags from not only law enforcement, but from individual customers or people in the world. And then we turn it around, take a look and decide.

So Alex Jones, for example, do you host any Alex Jones content or Infowars content? We don't.

Nothing on Alex Jones, nothing on Infowars.

What do you think about, you know, we've seen Apple, now Facebook, YouTube take a stand against Alex Jones, but at the same time there is this concern about tech companies deciding what lives and dies on the internet.

So separate out a couple of companies and think about social media networks. So I won't even use specific names, but you have social media companies which their whole business is around publishing content for free and then monetizing it based on ads. That is a big, big tricky issue that is deserved of all the time and attention that people spending around how that content is published, used, and then monetized. A company like GoDaddy, where we don't sell our customers' information, nor do we syndicate it to the world, we provide software for our customers to use and protect their data. I feel like it's fortunate to be in that situation, and I think all the time and attention around privacy, around how information is being used, particularly for these broad platforms that are kind of monetizing free content, is warranted.

Senator Ron Wyden said earlier there should be consequences for platforms that don't remove people like Alex Jones. I mean, these are private companies. They certainly have the right legally to decide. What stays and what goes? But do you think there should be consequences?

I think we need to think about the responsibilities of companies that publish and monetize content. So two Supreme Court decisions, right? The the reference of falsely crying fire in a crowded room—that was a 1919 Supreme Court decision that said free speech is tolerated up to that point where you're actually. Directly in promoting violence. That was upheld in a decision in 1969. And that was actually the last time the Supreme Court has actually put parameters around free speech and content syndication. And I think given how important technology is in the world and social media networks in general, I think maybe that's going to be an issue coming up in front of the Supreme Court.

Perhaps we should revisit it since it's been a century. You were chuckling a little bit during the conversation about Tesla and Elon Musk. David Welch, our Detroit bureau chief, said Elon was talking about how Elon doesn't like being a public company. So much. You're a public company CEO. Do you think he's— do you think he's crying wolf a little bit here, or do you think he does? You think he needs to grow up? I think—

I think as a founder of a company which, you know, God bless him, you know, the electric car is an awesome, awesome invention that I certainly hope works. I think he goes back and forth between wanting everybody to believe and, you know, what it's like to be a public company. And so I can understand him wanting to be private in the moment when he gets frustrated. You know, personally, for us at GoDaddy, the going public has helped us communicate what we do for people in the world. It's actually been a really nice thing. The more people that pay attention to us and realize, you know, what we do for people in the world, the better off we are.