Christine Jones' much-criticized 2011 essay in support of the Stop Online Piracy Act has disappeared from her personal website since New Times pointed it out.
Jones, the former Go Daddy general counsel now running for Arizona governor, had been vilified by legions of Internet users following the essay's initial appearance on politico.com. Go Daddy, the Scottsdale-based domain-name registrar, removed the essay from its own site in late 2011 and reversed its position on SOPA under fire.
But Jones kept the essay alive on her personal web site, the Rudy Syndrome -- until our October blog post about her site, that is.
See also: -Christine Jones Is a Necrophilia (Law) Expert Who Believes in the "Rudy Syndrome"
You may recall the gale-force cyber-storm that blew up in early 2012 over SOPA as it floated in Congress.
The stated intent of the bill was to help enforce copyright laws and slow the real problem of digital piracy. Internet advocates saw it as a threat to free speech that gave far too much control over the Internet to law enforcement.
While companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook were writing letters to Congress expressing fear of the bill, Jones was championing SOPA for Go Daddy.
After her essay touting SOPA was published on Politico in October of 2011, however, Go Daddy was blasted and boycotted by legions of Internet users.
Jones defended SOPA a month later in an article on nbcnews.com:
Christine Jones, general counsel at domain registrar Go Daddy, wrote a guest opinion piece on the political-news website Politico last month expressing support for SOPA. (It's behind a paywall on Politico, but Jones has reposted it on her blog.)Jones told SecurityNewsDaily that concerns that a site like GoDaddy might get shut down as a facilitator of online piracy if the SOPA or PROTECT IP bills become law are overblown.
"Disney doesn't care about your little website," Jones said. "They care about sites that are wholesale infringers."
Amid crushing criticism, Go Daddy flip-flopped on the bill a month later. The company explained at the time that it was taking down Jones' essay to "eliminate any confusion."
A few months after that, Jones left Go Daddy along with several other members of the company's management team. Now she's a Republican candidate for governor running on a platform of fiscal conservatism and -- naturally -- running illegal immigrants out of the country.
The SOPA bill died in Congress in late 2012.
We located Jones' Rudy Syndrome site a couple of months ago while googling around and wrote about it in a pre-Halloween blog post that also mentioned her ground-breaking college paper on necrophilia law.
Jones had published the SOPA essay in October of 2011, after it ran on Politico. As we noted in our post, it was somewhat surprising to see that she'd kept the memento published on her site, since it had obviously given her so much trouble in the past.
We figured if Jones had merely forgotten to take the essay down, she'd do so after our blog post. And it looks like that's just what happened, because the link to the Rudy Syndrome page with the SOPA essay is now dead.
If you want to read the essay, though, you can still find it elsewhere online -- sometimes with running commentary about how misguided it is.
Maybe this was just a computer glitch -- we'll let you know if Jones re-posts her essay.
But if Jones uploads anything else to the Rudy Syndrome blog, we're hoping it'll be her predictions for 2014.
