Just thinking and wondering about sites that were shut down...

[nolag]

Recently the US shut down 84 (or so) sites. Many had illegal products, some had torrents or trackers. I was initially thinking that the reason they could do this (with a court order) was one of the following reasons:

1) The registar was American, and they made them give the domain up in accordance to the law

2) Veri sign is American, ...

3) ICANN is American, ...

I was reading the articles and it seemed godaddy had no clue what was going on (I am sure the same would be true with enom), hence eliminating the registar.

If it is veri sign then getting a tld that is not run by them would avoid this (also moving hosts to a non-american company so they don't make them take the site down). Here is what I am now wondering, say I have a .TLD that is not by veri sign (or an American company), can ICANN shut down the site directly, or do they only accredit and monitor those who can? Say for example someone had an illegal site .<their country cctld> that does X but X is NOT illegal in their country. The host is in their country (or any other country where X is not illegal). Can ICANN shut it down, or is the only one with that power those in chage of the tld?

I was just thinking because if ICANN can shut it down then ICANN has too much power and it will cause the US to run the laws of the internet!

[handy]

Most of us couldn't give two hoots about those illegal sites. What the problem is, is where those that run the U.S. gov' want to take internet censorship/control, as demonstrated by ACTA - which is kept secret from the populations of the various countries who's governments are involved. Which is just plain wrong.

The internet & politics is becoming increasingly more intertwined unfortunately & what happens in the U.S. can have dramatic effects on much of the rest of the world, some of the reasons were noted in the previous post.

[maddbaron]

i think the new policy should apply only to us material...some sites are being shut down that show international material...i watch a lot of canadian tv even tho i'm in ny and i get them from these sites i went to one and it's gone...and i'm not a fan of internet censorship....

[Mmmbopdowedop]

I don't think even Americans like the way their region is run.
The rest of the world, in general, despise it.

It's kinda pathetic really that some random people who got good grades in their education, or the ones who happen to know somebody high up there, manage to get permision to do such retarded things and control people's lives, imo.

[t0p]

If you "own" a site whose tld is not administered by the USA, and the site is not hosted by a server situated in the USA, there is'nt much the USA can do about it officially. But unofficially there may be a whole bunch of stuff the USA can do. There are so many countries who are only too happy to comply with a US takedown request - even when the site in question is breaking no laws in the host country. Just about everyone wants to be best buddies with the USA; and if that involves taking down a few websites, so be it.

If you want to run a site that is immune from US takedown requests, you need to use a host in a country that doesn't care too much about hurting Uncle Sam's feelings. Iran comes to mind, as does North Korea. But then you have another problem: you have to follow whatever laws exist in the host nation, which may very well be just as draconian as the US laws!

Another approach is to have your site mirrored on hosts all over the world, in the hope that the takedown requests can't possibly keep up. But that kind of redundancy costs time and money. Which begs the question: is your site's content really that important?

[endotherm]

I don't think even Americans like the way their region is run.
The rest of the world, in general, despise it.

It's kinda pathetic really that some random people who got good grades in their education, or the ones who happen to know somebody high up there, manage to get permision to do such retarded things and control people's lives, imo.

ICANN used to be IANA, a private organization, run by Jon Postel (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Jon_Postel)the father of assigned constants on the internet. Jon, in addition to creating in part some of the most fundamental protocols that we take for granted today (TCP, ICMP, DNS, SMTP, etc), was also the editor of the Request For Comments (RFC) system documenting protocols, so that all could use them. Having been there from the beginning, he shaped many of the practices, policies, and philosophies upon which the global Internet is based.

in 1998, Jon effectively took control of all non-us govt TLDs (there were 12 at the time) to prevent power grabs by SIAC (Network Solutions) and the government. unfortunately, he was forced to return control by political pressures, and shortly afterward, the us govt asserted control over the root dns zones. they founded ICANN, to administer it as a quasi-governmental organization. it is technically an independent corporation, but it is subject to legislative oversight.

Jon Postel is a personal hero of mine, so I always get a little chocked up by RFC2468,
I Remember IANA (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2468) written by Vint Cerf.

[Zerocool Djx]

Censorship is wrong,... I dunno what they where shut down for, but in the end I think that they should only force people to categorize their sites, not have a right to sya what's on them. Like Porn should be .XXX so you could tell your internet providor to filter out .XXX sites to protect kids. But ultamitly you have that choice of saying that. Big brother needs to STFU and GTFO.

[Spice Weasel]

Like Porn should be .XXX so you could tell your internet providor to filter out .XXX sites to protect kids.

Like that's ever gonna happen, I've got a feeling that a lot of porn site visitors are under 18. They wouldn't switch if they knew they would get less visitors.

[Artemis3]

And this is why i rather use something like Opennic (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Opennic) for root DNS, together with pdnsd (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pdnsd) for persistent caching.

Make no mistake, Governments want control, and the community eventually will have to respond with strong counter measures, such as gnunet (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Gnunet).

Stuff like wikileaks (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikileaks) is unacceptable to them, so in the name of "blah" they will censor/take it down. It is the same everywhere in the world, more control, less freedom; so we will have to adapt and use the soon to be declared illegal tools, and non-sanctioned (Free) Software in non-sanctioned equipment (ie. anything you made).

People often laugh at things such as Tor (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tor_%28anonymity_network%29) thinking about China, etc, but soon you'll discover the problem is much closer.

Be ready.

[Spice Weasel]

The shame about Tor is that the majority of people who you are tunneling through are in countries with at least moderate internet censorship. (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9e/Internet_blackholes.svg/800px-Internet_blackholes.svg.png)



Blue No censorship
Yellow Some censorship
Red Country under surveillance
from Reporters Without Borders
Black Most heavily censored nations

[nolag]

Wow, I did not intend to get political with this post :oops:. I was thinking of it from a more technical standpoint. To be 100% hounest I think if you are in a country (hosted or with the registar), you need to follow thier laws. I don't have any sites like the one I described. I was just thinking from the perspective of what is involved in shutting down a site :P. I am against censorship, but at the same time if your site sells illegal knock-off of patent products then the country it is hosted in (or registered in) should be able to take it down. As per torrents, I would say it would need to depend on local laws.

Anyways if anyone knows how they did it (from a more technical view), I would be interested :).

[sydbat]

Wow, I did not intend to get political with this post :oops:. I was thinking of it from a more technical standpoint. To be 100% hounest I think if you are in a country (hosted or with the registar), you need to follow thier laws. I don't have any sites like the one I described. I was just thinking from the perspective of what is involved in shutting down a site :P. I am against censorship, but at the same time if your site sells illegal knock-off of patent products then the country it is hosted in (or registered in) should be able to take it down. As per torrents, I would say it would need to depend on local laws.

Anyways if anyone knows how they did it (from a more technical view), I would be interested :).Well...since ICANN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN) is based in the US and basically controls every IP address and domain name on Earth**, anything the US government / lobbyists want to shut down will get shut down worldwide. There is no way around it.

The technical aspect is simple - tell ICANN to seize the domain name and redirect it to another page, usually with some FBI-type warning. Again, no way around it.

Unfortunately, this leaves the entire Internet vulnerable to US government / lobbyists whims.

**"Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name System, are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)." - Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet).

[pricetech]

Wow, I did not intend to get political with this post

Not surprised it happened though. Folks around here tend to be very passionate about freedom and censorship.

In before close ???

[nolag]

Well...since ICANN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN) is based in the US and basically controls every IP address and domain name on Earth**, anything the US government / lobbyists want to shut down will get shut down worldwide. There is no way around it.

The technical aspect is simple - tell ICANN to seize the domain name and redirect it to another page, usually with some FBI-type warning. Again, no way around it....

Thanks, I guess that was what I wanted to know. I was not sure if ICANN did all the lookups and final things or if the local people are in charge. I was originally under the impression that if I looked up

somesite.ca
ICANN would only look at .ca and go oh, CIRA takes care of that. If that was the case then the US could not (without getting involved with Canada in this case) shut it down :P.

[thatguruguy]

Feel free to start your own internet, if you'd like.

[endotherm]

you could always set up your own root servers, but getting others to point to them is the issue.

[earthpigg]

ICANN ought to move out of the United States.

[Quadunit404]

ICANN ought to move out of the United States.

This.

[KiwiNZ]

Please keep any Political discussion to that which directly relates to Open Source issues.

[grief -l]

Please keep any Political discussion to that which directly relates to Open Source issues.

It's an impossible task. For that reason I have till now refrained from replying to this thread or the earlier one started by Handy. The subject of both is political, and the politics of it goes way beyond Open Source or even Software. (let's face it the shutdowns were not for the purposes of protecting copyright infringement on adult content). Producing cars is politics and so too clothing, food production, mining, forestry etc etc... the production of web content has become political. You can continue making rules for fairyland, but the subject of those two threads (and others in the future I predict) are playing now in the real world. The question is whether you want your members to debate what's happening to them and the domainspace in which you and they exist or just keep grinding away at the same old ax?

[earthpigg]

please don't encourage the powers that be to close threads, grief -l.

back on topic: A concern of mine is things like sourceforge, which already has to block access to folks that live in places like Cuba and Iran. Very unfortunate, and when combined with the subject of this thread... blek.

[KiwiNZ]

It's an impossible task. For that reason I have till now refrained from replying to this thread or the earlier one started by Handy. The subject of both is political, and the politics of it goes way beyond Open Source or even Software. (let's face it the shutdowns were not for the purposes of protecting copyright infringement on adult content). Producing cars is politics and so too clothing, food production, mining, forestry etc etc... the production of web content has become political. You can continue making rules for fairyland, but the subject of those two threads (and others in the future I predict) are playing now in the real world. The question is whether you want your members to debate what's happening to them and the domainspace in which you and they exist or just keep grinding away at the same old ax?

We have clearly stated rules with regards to political discussion and reasons for their prohibition.

I am sorry folks I am going to close this thread now.