Absolutely. I know this is Putin's War, but imagine asking your staff to be professional and respond to your Russian customers when they can hear Russian fighter jets overhead.
On one hand we ask large companies to show more heart and humanity, and on the other hand we rail against them when they take a principled stand.
How anyone can expect a company to honour any corporate agreement in such an environment boggles my mind. Let alone company that sells domains and prides itself on being 'cheap'.
People and principles should come first, and money second. This is exactly the world we want to live in, right? Not some capitalist dystopia.
FWIW, I do not begrudge affected customers being angry, that seems very fair. I just also think this is a very reasonable course of action by Namecheap.
I wish they included that bit in their outreach based on a lot of comments in this thread. It probably would've helped add some additional perspective into their decision making.
(This is one of those threads where we also thank dang for this service.)
I don't know how this is relevant. I am very much against this war, but there is very little I can do to stop it as a regular citizen. I'm currently doing everything I can to flee the country, as I don't think my family is not safe here. I don't understand how this is supposed to harm Putin's regime or any of his supporters.
Disrupting the everyday lives of Russian citizens is an effective way to incite change. Some will choose to flee the chaos, but some will choose to protest and fight the regime.
Will there be good Russians unfairly hurt as collateral damage? Yes.
But the Ukrainian civilians being gunned down in the streets and having their homes blown up are also being unfairly hurt. There is very little they can do to stop it, but they've been forced to drop everything and fight.
Like it or not, you're on one side of a war. It's to be expected that your life will be inconvenienced - so have lives on the other side. You can flee - nothing wrong with that - or you can protest, but you can't hope that you won't be impacted.
> Disrupting the everyday lives of Russian citizens
No it doesnt because is not a democratic country, why is it so hard for people like you to understand that things work very different in a democratic country than in non-democratic country?
Do you know what happens when you are in a country that doesnt respect human rights and you go to "protest"?
Do you know what happens when you, as a citizen with no power, try to fight a military regime?
Do you really think, russians right now are enjoyinig this and will somehow march to get Putin's head because their quality of life will be miserable now? no, they wont, because the moment they start doing it, they will be repressed and killed, and there you will be, super happy sharing your support posts to those people
the worst part of all of these, is that you don't realize that one of the goals of putin is to undermine his own state, so he can keep power for the years to come, and here you are, helping him :), good job at making every russian life even worse.
"No it doesnt because is not a democratic country, why is it so hard for people like you to understand that things work very different in a democratic country than in non-democratic country?"
I sympathize with this position but I also feel conflicted because despite the enormous amount of evidence that Putin was a bad guy as recently as 2017 he had 80+% approval rating. If had not had large scale popular support for most of the last 20 years despite his anti-democratic anti-freedom behaviour would he be in a position to execute this war?
I don't have good answers for this question but just as democracy isn't just having a vote political support in a non-democracy isn't just having the legal use of violence at your disposal. It is challenging for anyone from outside Russia that wants to oppose his regime to find a way that doesn't hurt ordinary Russians if most ordinary Russians mostly have supported him.
Protest isn't even a necessary event. If the reward of continuing the war becomes less than the damage of continuing it, it only needs Putin. Regardless, he always enjoyed a very high approval rating while amassing his position.
>Do you know what happens when you are in a country that doesnt respect human rights and you go to "protest"?
>Do you know what happens when you, as a citizen with no power, try to fight a military regime?
Luckily I am not Ukrainian, so I am not having this discovery forced upon me.
But what does anyone expect? All this international business depends on stable, peaceful relations. Russia broke that. The party will not go on.
We know you're not personally responsible for the invasion of Ukraine. And that's not any different than the embargoes during any prior armed conflict.
Yup, it's actually making things harder for us to move away from Russia. One more thing to deal with. And this NameCheap's decision didn't hurt Putin even a tiny bit.
> And this NameCheap's decision didn't hurt Putin even a tiny bit.
IOC lists have been plagued with domains registered through Namecheap for years.
Namecheap is doing this for ideological reasons but this single action should (in theory) disrupt a lot of existing malware connections to hostile infrastructure.
https://www.namecheap.com/careers/ukraine/