Parler, the beleaguered social network advertised as a “free speech” alternative to Facebook and Twitter, has had a tough month. Apple and Google removed the Parler app from their stores, and Amazon blocked the platform from using its hosting services. Parler has since found a home in DDoS-Guard, a Russian digital infrastructure company. But now it appears DDoS-Guard is about to be relieved of more than two-thirds of the Internet address space the company leases to clients — including the Internet addresses currently occupied by Parler.

The pending disruption for DDoS-Guard and Parler comes compliments of Ron Guilmette, a researcher who has made it something of a personal mission to de-platform conspiracy theorist and far-right groups.

In October, a phone call from Guilmette to an Internet provider in Oregon was all it took to briefly sideline a vast network of sites tied to 8chan/8kun — a controversial online image board linked to several mass shootings — and QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory which holds that a cabal of Satanic pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against President Donald Trump. As a result, those QAnon and 8chan sites also ultimately ended up in the arms of DDoS-Guard.

Much like Internet infrastructure firm CloudFlare, DDoS-Guard typically doesn’t host sites directly but instead acts as a go-between to simultaneously keep the real Internet addresses of its clients confidential and to protect them from crippling Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.

The majority of DDoS-Guard’s employees are based in Russia, but the company is actually incorporated in two other places: As “Cognitive Cloud LLP” in Scotland, and as DDoS-Guard Corp. based in Belize.  However, none of the company’s employees are listed as based in Belize, and DDoS-Guard makes no mention of the Latin American region in its map of global operations.

In studying the more than 11,000 Internet addresses assigned to those two companies, Guilmette found that approximately 66 percent of them were doled out to the Belize entity by LACNIC, the regional Internet registry for the Latin American and Caribbean regions.

Suspecting…