Many Internet users cheered when the Daily Stormer, a website openly devoted to white supremacy and neo-Nazism, was sent packing by its Web domain host, GoDaddy, following last weekend’s racist violence in Charlottesville, Va.

GoDaddy’s action, which turned the Daily Stormer into a site without a host, seemed like a beacon of effective response to an era of rising hate speech online — years of vicious attacks that had driven many women, blacks, LGBTQ individuals and others off such popular platforms as Twitter and Facebook, and seemed only to have intensified with the rise of Donald Trump.

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“This part of the Charlottesville story makes people think about who controls speech on the Internet,” says Daphne Keller of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. “We don’t have 1st Amendment rights to stop private companies from shutting down our speech, and most of the Internet is run by private companies. Most of us want some intermediaries to play that role — when we go on Twitter, we don’t want to be barraged with obscenities and on Facebook we don’t want to see racism. But it’s kind of scary that all these other companies can also be shutting down speech willy-nilly, and that’s certainly their right under the law.”