Uncle Sam: If It Ends in .Com, It’s .Seizable

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-sites/

by e1ven • 14 years ago

179 104 14 years ago

hef198983• 14 years ago

Interessting. If I put it in the context with megaupload, it basically means that .com is under the iron grip of us law (or any other copyright-y what ever law in the world) and if that doesn't work out you can arrest german citizens living in NZ operating a website owned by a company in Hong Kong for aleagly breaking us law. Wow, that explains why the web is speaking english. How do I miss the time of the treestructred websites back the day when the internet was still 56k fast but free. Great news for content owners, on the other hand.

talmand2• 14 years ago

In the long run this is actually really bad for content owners. Content owners, in their effort to protect their business model, has actually given the government the tools to shut them down if their content is found to be "undesirable". Just because the government likes you today doesn't mean it will tomorrow.

raganwald7• 14 years ago

Just because the government likes you today doesn't mean it will tomorrow.

Of all people, I would expect Hollyood executives to be particularly sensitive to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist

hef198983• 14 years ago

Sounds like co-domination. If the content lobby controls government that controls the content lobby... No matter who decides what is undesireable it is a dangerous road to take. Where do you draw the line? Streaming sports events? Sharing 50 Cent songs? Protests against legislations? Child pronography? Law makers in democratic countries should be really carefull about the direction they take in these post-SOPA days. The tools they are thinking about to control online piracy are really dangerous weapons in the wrong hands. "Undesireable" was a welcome excuse already to often. Let's hope artist, and managers, remember the past when possibilities of censorship where actually used.

rmc8• 14 years ago

Technically they were arrested by NZ police for breaking NZ law.

hef198983• 14 years ago

So Thailand would have been a better choice, at least for copyright issues (IMHO they don't have one over there).

iwwr• 14 years ago

Credit card transactions are also by design bound to the US. A transaction going from France to Germany, legal in both places, may still need to be routed through the US and hence controllable. And when all that fails, the US can pull on their extradition treaties to get governments to hand over anyone else.

ghurlman• 14 years ago

Is this just a result of Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, etc. being American companies? Are there no non-American credit card conglomerates out there?

timbre• 14 years ago

If it is just a result of the credit card companies being American, JCB is a fairly widespread non-American (Japanese) alternative.

sek• 14 years ago

This is really dangerous for the .com brand!

What are generic non country specific domains and is the new domain you have to own? This is the reason why they are so popular, nobody uses .us exactly for that reason.

Is .co a replacement, it's similar to .com, short and non US based. Maybe this will make the domain indifferent, TPB has .se now as the primary domain.

Roboprog• 14 years ago

It's hard to tell from the article if this was jack-booted thuggery, or if some kind of due process was followed to shut down an organization causing actual harm. Anybody?

talmand2• 14 years ago

I have never seen a report about the US government seizing a domain that also happen to include what most US citizens would consider due process. It's literally you wake up one day and your website is gone. In some cases people found out from a third party, such as the media asking for comment.

tomp3• 14 years ago

Does it matter? What the company was doing is legal in Canada, where the company was based (if I understand the article correctly).

Unless if by "causing harm" you mean "not paying enough tax to the US", then I fail to see how this website was causing any harm...

ubernostrum• 14 years ago

As I've said again and again and again and again and again:

If you are engaging in what is undeniably a business relationship (money/goods/services/written agreements/etc.) with people who are in a country, then it doesn't matter where you are; you can quite easily end up subject to the laws of that country. This is not a new idea. This is not a scary idea.

bodog got their domain seized because they thought they could engage in that sort of relationship with US customers despite offering services which were illegal in the US. This is downright mundane, and the amount of ignorant hyperbolic OMG FASCIST IMPERIALIST JACKBOOTED THUGS TRAMPLING ALL OVER ME hysteria it's generated frankly disgusts me.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 14 years ago

> an organization causing actual harm

Sports betting. It probably does cause actual harm to some, but that's debatable. And should all occasionally harmful things (like say, guns and vodka) be outlawed? Liquor stores and betting shops in poor neighbourhoods: are they harmful? Should they be outlawed?

What this company does is legal many places, though not in the USA. Were some of the people who chose to use the site located in the USA? Yes. Is the site merely a front for enabling US citizens to break their country's law? Harder to say what the percentages of users are.

This seems similar to closing down a betting shop located in Canada, on the grounds that a lot of the patrons had crossed the border to go there and break US law.

screwt• 14 years ago

I'd say it's more like, having a betting shop in Canada, but the only entrance is via an underground tunnel whose entrance is in the US. The US have said "the only use of this tunnel is to disobey US law, and so we're closing down the tunnel."

That analogy leaves me with a few questions: (1) is a "tunnel to Canada" a good analogy for "a .com domain hosted in Canada"? (2) Is it true/ a good thing that .coms come under US jurisdiction? (I think this is the case, but shouldn't be).

The problem arises because, unfortunately, .com domains are based under US jurisdiction. Given that, there's an option for US-local lawmakers to apply for a takedown.

raganwald7• 14 years ago

I recently registered a new domain name for a side project, http://recursiveuniver.se. Catchy domain names like this are a little passé, but I’m steering clear of .com indefinitely.

itmag2• 14 years ago

So you trust the Swedish government?

raganwald7• 14 years ago

If you have a thought to share, do so with my blessing. A one-liner rhetorical question like this works fairly well in conversation but not as well in a threaded forum where people are looking for a more compact expression of ideas.

verelo2• 14 years ago

By comparison i would...also they do make great chocolate? Whats not to like...

I've registered a few .it's (Italy) and still maintain a bunch of .com.au's. I dont know, the internet is starting to scare me...maybe avoiding .com isnt a terrible idea, but i have no idea how the others would behave. Likely they wouldn't be much better...

I feel like we're in the 60's of the Internet and soon 'the man' is going to come down on us all and we'll have to get real jobs and stop smoking our virtual weed.

huggyface3• 14 years ago

To second the comment that itmag made, you are simply replacing one country with another. Recall the debacles that happened among the cute .ly TLDs when Libya decided that Islamic law applied to sites like vb.ly.

http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2010/10/the-ly-domain-space-to-b...

raganwald7• 14 years ago

TLDs are a marketplace. The more customers move around, the larger the economic force exerting influence on countries to behave a certain way. Moving domains by itself is not enough, but it’s a step I’ve taken.

If people sit on their hands and say, “It’s all the same really, no point in doing anything,” then nothing will ever change. You have to vote a certain way, lobby, speak out, protest, write blog posts, and yes, even move domains from one place to a seemingly similar other place if you want to make the world a better place.

larrys4• 14 years ago

"I’m steering clear of .com indefinitely."

Why? Sounds like cutting your nose to spite your face.

If you had a store to open and all the customers were on "K" street would you not go there because "K" street had a .0001 chance of crime vs. a street with .000000001 chance of crime.

Is there rationality in your decision (for your particular purpose) or are you just protesting against what you see as a potential slippery slope?

raganwald7• 14 years ago

But I don’t have a store, therefore I am not cutting off my nose to spite my face. If I did have a store, I would have to ask myself whether being MyRaganwaldStoreDotCom is somehow superior to MyRaganwaldStoreDotSomethingElse.

But until I have that store, I needn’t worry about it. So I don’t see any irrationality here whatsoever.

ktizo4• 14 years ago

.com is only valuable because it is a default that is perceived to be valuable, so it could loose value really quickly if it becomes perceived as a risky place to do business, much in the same way as a currency can fall like a stone if it loses trust.

Also, when people access a site, they either type in a domain from a physical source, or more often they search or follow links. Which TLD is used in the domain doesn't really affect this process very much, except in situations of 'passing off'. So perhaps it is a good idea to register the .com, but just not do anything with it.

rmc8• 14 years ago

A Principled Stand? After all, change starts somewhere…

joejohnson• 14 years ago

Good call. Now you'll be protected when the US government starts cracking down on those Conway's Game of Life websites.

shareme• 14 years ago

What people fail to realize is that US DOJ paved the way for other countries who do not want free internet to do what the DOJ does..ie India can demand that any *.in domain has to follow Indian law and take down any posts that disparage its leaders, etc..

Its really a very bad long term move on DOJ's part and especially undercuts the US State department efforts

anamax• 14 years ago

> ie India can demand that any .in domain has to follow Indian law and take down any posts that disparage its leaders, etc..

Why is it unreasonable for a .in domain to follow Indian law? Isn't that the whole point of country-specific domains?

YooLi2• 14 years ago

Who decided that .com is for everyone? (serious question)

jgarmon• 14 years ago

There's a legal principle call Forum Non Conveniens that is supposed to remedy this, though I don't know if anyone has challenged these seizures on those grounds. Basically, a legal matter is supposed to be tried in the most relevant and appropriate jurisdiction. For example, you sue a corporation in the state where it violated civil law, rather than state where it's headquartered. I shouldn't have to fly to Dallas to sue Pizza Hut if my local franchise poisoned me.

That said, the Internet breaks down a lot of established jurisdictional law because a website can operate effectively anywhere the Internet exists, and as such can theoretically be subject to the laws of any web-connected jurisdiction. These seizures are just another example of how the law has not caught up to the basic operating procedures of the web.

There is a certain legal philosophy that says the Internet is operating under its own version of Maritime Law, which is to say its a non-national zone where the law is defined by consensus practice and then ratified by bordering or participating jurisdictions. International salvage rights emerged from common maritime practice, and are now generally recognized as legally binding.

That's in theory a good model for the web, but I'm very certain the US Government doesn't see it that way.

scottdw2• 14 years ago

The US constitution also grants a right to a jury trial in "all suits at common law where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars".

All US judicial authority derives from the constitution. Given a controversy under the jurisdiction of the Federal courts, a trial cannot be denied the agreeved party unless:

1. There is no controversy

2. There is a stipulation in the constitution, or the jurisdictional laws passed by congress, that says federal jurisdiction doesn't exist.

3. There is a valid treaty which specifies a different process

4. The case was already tried.

5. Neither party is subject to the laws of the US.

Absent those conditions the US courts would have to take the case.

Forum selection conventions must still conform to the constitution.

If you wanted to change this you would need to convince Congress to pass a law changing enforcement of copyright.

rmc8• 14 years ago

The US Constitution does not apply outside the USA. Other countries have their own constitutions or legal systems.

Symmetry• 14 years ago

This isn't a suit at common law, though, this is a seizure by government officials. The courts have generally held that those only have to allow you a chance to legally contest it after the fact.

snowwrestler• 14 years ago

This article does not mention it at all, but Bodog.com was accepting online payments from residents of Maryland. That is how a MD state court was able to establish jurisdiction. Once that was done, they were able to take action against Verisign, a U.S.-based company.

hristov• 14 years ago

I really doubt forum non conveniens can be applied here. The website allegedly broke US law on US soil. Furthermore, it seems that the plaintiff is the US government itself. It would certainly be more inconvenient (or probably even impossible) for US law enforcement to sue a canadian company in canada.

bcantoni• 14 years ago

I'm beginning to think registering a non-US domain will be a good strategy for internet businesses - either as a backup or primary business move.

Also, I didn't remember wired.com comments being such a cesspool...

mmaunder• 14 years ago

I see a distributed hosting model with encrypted peer-routed traffic in our future. It would include peer to peer DNS and country neutral hosting. By that I mean redundant servers in multiple jurisdictions.

Without the ability to take servers offline and to firewall traffic based on source/destination, what is an overreaching government to do?

This reminds me of the Laffer curve of taxation vs tax revenue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

As government interference with the free Internet reaches a critical level, their enforcement and intelligence gathering ability will begin to decrease.

SoftwareMaven4• 14 years ago

Isn't that pretty close to Tor (ironically developed by the US government)?

pavelkaroukin4• 14 years ago

if we are talking about P2P DNS only, it is more like "namecoin". Tor do not have anything like DNS. You can have local directory, but it is more like /etc/hosts

rmc8• 14 years ago

Tor does the anonymous routing, and the distributed DNS (with *.onion domain names). However servers still have to be physically located in one place.

Freenet IIRC does the distrbuted hosting.

mtrimpe• 14 years ago

By the way, the bodog.com domain performs quite well.

A quick performance scan show it can comfortably handle 50 concurrent requests with a 5.5MB throughput.

I'm very curious what kind of numbers longer tests on higher bandwidth connections would generate.

http://pastebin.com/FPfjTiJS

jQueryIsAwesome• 14 years ago

Well, looks like Verisign should move to another country for the sake of their client's clients... Sweden perhaps?

tomp3• 14 years ago

Think again. As seen in the ThePirateBay debacle, Sweden is practically in the US jurisdiction, as far as online crimes are concerned...

dangrossman• 14 years ago

Verisign only controls the .COM registry because the US Department of Commerce gives them the contract. It's not their property otherwise. If the DoC doesn't like how Verisign is handling it, they won't renew the contract and will have a different company manage it.

pavelkaroukin4• 14 years ago

seizing .com is like a censor. while I do not believe in efficiency of censoring, I agree every society have right to do it. But it should not affect other societies. So correct measure would be direct all US-based ISP block access to bodog.com, not steal IP from canadian company.

SoftwareMaven4• 14 years ago

But the US population won't stand for that kind of "great firewall", and the Federal police forces must be showns to be doing something, so you end up with this.

pavelkaroukin4• 14 years ago

But why US population stands censoring in form of seizing domain then? I think you overestimate "US population". It is not a walmart censored, it is some gambling website.

SoftwareMaven4• 14 years ago

If the UN were an organization with meaning, the US should be getting slapped for stuff like this. As an American citizen, I am revolted at what my government has become (I still think it is a pretty good country, but that is changing, too).

The constant rhetoric of groups like the Tea Party around "what the founding fathers wanted" is a response to things like the Fourth Amendment being completely ignored. It is unfortunate so much of that anger gets focused in ultimately useless directions with the Democratic witch hunting. The Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force was started by the Reagan administration.

TDL• 14 years ago

Unfortunately the U.S.G. has operated in this manner for a number of decades. It is merely expanding it's power into a new realm.

rmc8• 14 years ago

The US, along with a few other countries have a permanent vetoes on the UN Security Council. If you are a US citizen and would like to see the UN get more teeth, campaign for your government to give up it's permanent seat.

paulhauggis• 14 years ago

You are angry at the republicans in the US, yet in general, the left wants more government control over our lives.

ThaddeusQuay2• 14 years ago

"You are angry at the republicans in the US, yet in general, the left wants more government control over our lives."

Democrats and Republicans are merely different sides of the same rusty coin.

onemoreact2• 14 years ago

Both sides of the Left-Right debate want more control.

Gay marriage is only an issue because some Republicans feel they have every right to control your personal relationships. A few Republicans also want to ban abortion, which is again a ridiculousness intrusive government control. Let alone tapping every form of communication, tightening immigration restrictions, increasing law enforcement funding etc. Even the idea we can dictate what other country's do inside their brooders suggests a level of control that's unreasonable.

PS: I would love to vote for Ron Paul, but everyone else just seems to pay lip service to the idea of smaller government without intending to do so.

ktizo4• 14 years ago

By global standards, the US government doesn't have a left wing. In most places in the world the Democrats would be considered slightly right of center free-market capitalists.

[edit] For example, in the US the Democrats publicly say they want healthcare to be affordable, in the UK the Conservatives are the right-wing party and publicly say they want to keep healthcare free and available to everyone based on need, not the ability to pay.

SoftwareMaven4• 14 years ago

I'm sick of both "sides". I'm tired of people getting caught up in "<Party I'm not in> is destroying are government, but <Party I'm in> is the solution to all our problems", when both parties are raping our rights. If I was a bit more tin-foil oriented, I could imagine a conspiracy that intentionally puts party members at odds to distract from the real power grab going on. I'm not convinced it isn't just human tribalism at work, though.

"My chief can beat up your chief."

(And if you really believe one side wants more control than the other, regardless of side, you've bought it, hook, line and sinker. The question isn't about control, anymore. It's about how to express that control.)

rmc8• 14 years ago

The USA should be careful about throwing it's weight around like this too much. Do it too much and the rest of the world will either (a) start using a different .com root server or (b) force the USA to give up power over .com

YooLi2• 14 years ago

If the rest of the world sees it as such a problem, whey don't they do either a) or b) already? (serious question)

rmc8• 14 years ago

Cause it hasn't become a big problem yet. The main sites that have been taken down are minority or suspicious sites. Most of the countries that would care enough to do something about this (e.g. Europe) are mostly ideologically similar to USA on a lot of issues. The internet is still so very young, a lot could happen in the next 50 years.

swombat2• 14 years ago

Well, I finally caved in and purchased swomb.at.

Seems like the US govt is determined to destroy the value of dot-com domains. I'm sure thousands of domain squatters are crying their eyes out right now!

masonhensley• 14 years ago

So, if you moved to swomb.at, would you just redirect swombat.com to it? Is that a way people can have the best of both worlds?

1- you own the .com domain for branding, people understand it etc

2- your site isn't actually a .com

Would SEO be hurt by doing something like this?

ohgodthecat• 14 years ago

SEO shouldn't be hurt (unless of course you are running the same site at both swomb.at and swombat.com), however with that said you won't get the seo boost that .com gives.

Another thought: swomb.at could be considered worse than say swombat.at as it is using the TLD to complete the word but I may be completely wrong in that case.

swombat2• 14 years ago

I'm a huge believer in fighting link-rot as much as possible, so unless the US govt seized my domain for some reason, I would make sure all swombat.com links would still work.

philipmorg• 14 years ago

So are there any TLDs that are safe from seizure? If so, which ones? If not, which ones are less likely to be seized?

nkvoll• 14 years ago

.local seems to be safe for now

ihsw• 14 years ago

.local conflicts directly with the mDNS protocol (used by Apple Bonjour and Linux Avahi service-discovery systems).

.is, however, is managed by Iceland. Iceland has been positioning itself as a haven for organizations concerned about free-speech and broad-sweeping censorship.

count3• 14 years ago

'.', the DNS root zone, is considered the property of the US Dept. of Commerce, so, no.

However, I could see a seizure of a domain in a different country's TLD (ccTLD to be specific) causing a diplomatic scuffle between the US and the foreign country. I can't imagine France would be thrilled with the FBI seizing 'foo.co.fr' or something.

wmf2• 14 years ago

It's generally not technically possible for the US to seize individual domains located in ccTLDs, so that's a pretty moot issue.

ec4292• 14 years ago

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: _the US cannot be trusted with stewardship of the global Internet_.

Wired suggests that some want to move this stewardship to the UN. This is not a solution.

A still more decentralised approach is needed; if the Internet is to truly "treat censorship as damage, and route around it", no core Internet protocol can afford to have any kind of "root server", "switch board" or "root certification authority".

There are plenty of good hackers here, perhaps more importantly there are people here who can build communities; rather than trying to invent the "next facebook", I hope you will divert some of your attention to making a pervasively distributed Internet both (a) technically feasible and (b) desired by the Man In The Street.

andrewflnr• 14 years ago

This, a thousand times over. I don't know why more people aren't saying it. We've got to build a better decentralized Internet.

waqf• 14 years ago

Better, meaning better than Tor? Better than I2P?

I think we've got to get people to start using the decentralized internet we have.

sdfjkl• 14 years ago

Alternative DNS roots[1] will get increasingly popular if this sort of thing (and the DNS-based censorship ISPs are forced into) keeps going on unchecked (read: ICANN keeps sleeping). We may yet end up with an internet where DNS resolvers check multiple roots in descending order of preference, with the ICANN root last.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root

Uncle Sam: If It Ends in .Com, It’s .Seizable

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