Making Profits from Hate Sites

I have written about my efforts to have the Holocaust-denial site kreuz.net shut down in the US. Holocaust denial is a felony crime in Germany but perfectly legal in the United States, so the anonymous owners/operators simply find a US service provider to host their Web site and they can spew their poison with impunity back into Germany and Austria.  Now, most of these US hosting operations do not read German, so they are not aware that kreuz.net is denying the historical fact of the murder of six million Jews, or that it is calling for the elimination of lesbian and gay people, or that its many anonymous commenters fantasize openly about the assassination of the "Blut- und Homo-Praesident" Barack Obama. When I informed one hosting provider, Global Net Access in Atlanta, about the nature of the hate site and submitted translations they agreed it was not an appropriate customer.  Unfortunately, however, not every US service provider is as ethical as Global Net Access. In fact, there are companies that traffic in hate as part of their business model.

The operators of kreuz.net joined a number of other hate sites – sites openly expressing pro-Nazi sympathies as well as racist and virulently homophobic sites – and set up shop at Steadfast Networks in Chicago.  It turns out that this technology company has created a profitable niche business in trafficking in hate. Not only is Steadfast Networks aware of the premise of kreuz.net but the company is proud that it facilitates anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial sites.  In response to my inquiry they wrote back:

We're quite clear about content hosting policies; we
comply with US law and otherwise do our best to uphold free speech. Blithely
denying the Holocaust, while certainly ignorant and not in line with views of
any of our staff, is fully legal here.

The CEO of Steadfast Networks even implies on his blog that hosting hate sites is somehow patriotic, that he is standing for freedom of speech: 

With free speech, you need to take the bad with the good; you can't
just have the good. Sure, we could restrict certain speech, but then do
we truly have free speech? Who is to determine which ideas can be
freely expressed and which cannot? What if we were not allowed to speak
against our government in times of war or unable to profess a religion
just because it was unpopular at the time?

Steadfast Networks and other companies like it caught the attention of the Chicago Tribune, which wrote about how German hate groups are circumventing German and EU laws by operating their sites in the US: 

Hundreds of foreign-language Web sites – some tied to the Chicago area –are using U.S.
servers to dodge laws abroad that prohibit Holocaust denial or racist
and anti-Semitic speech. Run by hosts in the United States, they
thrive out of reach of prosecutors in Europe, Canada and elsewhere.
Locally, the connections range from Radio Islam, a hate site inspired
by a Moroccan exile in Sweden, to a site created by a former Cicero man
who was extradited to Germany for Holocaust denial. One Chicago server
company (Steadfast Networks) is home to as many as 17 hate sites, eight of them European, a
watchdog groups said.
In the past, Berlin has estimated that
computers in the United States host 800 such sites in the German
language alone, although its embassy in Washington says no current count
is available.

It would appear that this company is actively seeking hate sites and profiting from their activities. The executives wrote to me that as long as the sites were not promoting "physical violence" they could publish anything they wanted.  The problem is these sites give comfort and support to those who are contemplating physical violence against Jews, gays, women, etc… Yes, they are obeying the laws of the United States and conforming to the First Amendment, but, by making profits from hate, they are extremely unethical.