Slashdot Mirror
Police Demand Summary Domain Takedown, Traffic Redirection
Stunt Pope writes "This morning, Toronto-based domain registrar easyDNS received a request from the City of London (UK) police demanding that they summarily take down a BitTorrent search site based out of Singapore — or else they would 'refer the matter to ICANN' — suggesting easyDNS could lose its accreditation. The police further directed easyDNS to point all traffic for the domain to an IP address that promoted competing commercial online music services based out of London, UK."
easyDNS raises some important questions in the blog post they put up after receiving the request. Quoting: "Who decides what is illegal? What makes somebody a criminal? Given that the subtext of the request contains a threat to refer the matter to ICANN if we don't play along, this is a non-trivial question. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought it was something that gets decided in a court of law, as opposed to 'some guy on the internet' sending emails. While that's plenty reason enough for some registrars to take down domain names, it doesn't fly here."
The City of London is not the city of London (as if Britain vs UK wasn't confusing enough for foreigners). The City of London is about one square mile where a large number of big businesses operate. In the City of London, these businesses get to vote in local elections, normal people can't just run for political office, and the police are about as far away from publicly accountable as it's possible for law enforcement to get. When people in Britain refer to "The City" (compare with "Wall Street"), they're talking about this tiny piece of the capital.
In short, someone in big business has been crying to their rent-a-cop again.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
If I have a legal media company in the UK, can I demand they put a link to my site on there as well?
Could media companies sue them for unfair competition?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The "police page" at 83.138.166.114 may be fake. That address resolves via reverse DNS to "S82574.clubonside.dk". But "clubonside.dk" isn't in DNS or the .dk registry. It was live in 2006, and was a site for soccer fans, then moved to "clubonside.com", and is now defunct.
The IP address is hosted by Rackspace in London.
Also note that on the page, there are no links to any law enforcement organization. All the links are ads for "safe and reliable online content". A domain actually taken over by the Serious Organized Crimes Agency in the UK looks like this. No ads, links only to a UK government site.
This looks like some private "IP protection" company impersonating a police agency.
The AUP is an agreement between a service provider and its customers. That's it. So the only two entities who have any say in whether there's an issue with the agreement are the two parties to it. Somebody else wants to shoehorn their own agenda into that, get a court order or go to hell.
That's why easyDNS can and does say that they are the arbiters of what constitutes a violation of the AUP.
Or as George W Bush would say, "We're the deciders".