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US Asserts Super-Jurisdiction Over Dot-Com, Dot-Net, and Dot-Org Domains
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist reports that last week State of Maryland prosecutors were able to
obtain a warrant ordering Verisign, the company that manages the dot-com domain name registry, to redirect the website to a warning page
advising that it has been seized by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The message from the case is clear: all dot-com, dot-net, and
dot-org domain names are subject to U.S. jurisdiction regardless of where they operate or where they were registered. This grants the U.S. a form of 'super-jurisdiction' over Internet activities, since most other
countries are limited to jurisdiction with a real and substantial
connection."
Maybe now people will start using ccTLDs for everything apart from multinationals. That'll reduce the problem, but I still think the international ones ought to be run by an international organisation. The ITU are reasonably impartial, aren't they?
This would be an excellent opportunity for Iceland, which has been working on become a haven for free speech, to drum up a few million dollars worth of business for their ccTLD.
Liberty in your lifetime
You should be aware that co is the ccTLD for Colombia, a country the United States enjoys a close relationship with. Well, it's a cozy relationship with one of their governments, anyhow. They've got the official government, the government with half the guns, and the government with most of the drugs. In any event, it's the official government that would be the issue if push came to shove over a domain.
Also, GoDaddy pimping anything is frequently a good reason to avoid whatever they're pimping.
Write failed: Broken pipe
While I'm sure that the feds managed to do something tasteless and possibly illegal with this power, I'm a bit confused by the summary:
.com pointing to it placed the site, server(s), or operator(s) under US jurisdiction would be rather more dramatic; but the DNS record that points FOO.com to your IP has always been under American jursdiction...
In order to 'have' a FOO.com/.net/.org domain name, you have to pay for the appropriate registration with Verisign, a US corporation, who handles those domains. If the feds secure the appropriate court order, they can direct Verisign to have your FOO.com point to a different IP.
Ok. Hasn't that always been the case?
Some sort of argument that a site having a
Absofuckinglutely.
That's why you would have to point your browser to solarmovie.eu instead of .com if you wanted to watch movies for free.
But, of course, I do not recommend that, because it would presumably be illegal.
No, because most companies don't care to do illegal activity which will cause legal action to allow for this action against their domain. And if they don't fit into that category, chances are they are already on a different domain.
This was a Canadian website doing something legal in Canada. We have turned a corner where obeying the law is no longer protection from arrest or confiscation.
If you are the least big worried about it then you need to be working for legal reform rather than the stupidity which is this article. As if you have a problem with this, you have a problem with US law. Period. So please, let's stop having the dipshit of the week post more stupidity about a symptom that largely only creates problems for criminals. And if you disagree, then go fix the legal system rather than boo-hoo about how a legal system is doing perfectly legal things with the entities its largely created, nurtured, owns, and controls - as in, is clearly within its jurisdiction.
It also creates a problem for forums, blogs, independent companies hosted at a provider that also hosts forums and blogs, file storage providers, cloud services... But you are absolutely correct in that we do need to fix the laws, and the people that believe in global projection of law to independent nations. And I say this from the US.
Perhaps it's time to move away from total dependence on domain names. Their value comes inherently from qualities that invite dispute.
With search services, it's quite possible to find hosts that have no domain name at all. I can't post my favorite example, because the server has insufficient power to handle lots of hits, but such things definitely exist. There's still some problem with control by the search companies, but there's a finer granularity of competition there.
Once you get to a given host, you can determine whether it's World Wrestling or World Wildlife. That doesn't have to be certified (very unreliably) by a DNS registrar.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
TPB has also switched to an .se domain, that they forward to by default. But with TPB now being DHT-only and magnet-link-only, and even more easily mirrored, it would be stupid and pointless to take it down.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
the .com itself will only benefit as a legit business platform
For sufficiently restrictive values of "legit". As in, considered legitimate in the 100% intersection of all jurisdictions within the United States (demonstrably, State and Federal courts; via court action, possibly municipal and other bailiwicks).
So I suspect that .com will only be used for "mainstream" "wholesome" stuff that forms the lowest common consumer denominator, and anything with the faintest hint of controversy will vanish into clear air. Or other TLDs.
BTW, I don't think anyone has formally espoused any kind of legal formulation providing rationale to seizing a .com domain administered from a foreign registrar, so I wouldn't feel too safe that there's some kind of logical or procedural safety in avoiding "default" TLDs. The US government could theoretically alter lookups of any specific DNS entry it wished to blacklist via its control of the world DNS root zones, and Verisign (yeah, them again) as the controlling contracted agent holding the root zones would probably act on such an order.
Of course, when that happens, the rest of the world will form one or more alternate root zones and the US will have to live within its Great Firewall. Sad, but since the DNS system is driven by consensus, breaking consensus breaks DNS.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Seriously though, is there any doubt that the USA is fast becoming the schoolyard bully of the world? And we wonder why other countries hate us so!
There was never any confusion on this point. The US asserted this was the case. The rest of the world asserted this was the case. The US made some hints they "wouldn't" but never backed down from the assertion that they *could*.
Learn to love Alaska
The Oatmeal describes this phenomenon perfectly.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)