Re: A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Christian de Larrinaga [cdel () firsthand net]
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2008 5:33 AM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] Digest 1.1633 for ip

Can anybody enlighten us if ENOM have just refused to host as the DNS
provider the DNS records for these domains or whether they have
actually suspended (unglued) the domains in question (i.e., the owner
cannot even move the authoritative DNS for the zones to a more willing
provider?

If the latter then ENOM have a major problem on their hands as they
have just resigned all their non US business.

If true then this event is educative as it didn't even take a US
government department of Commerce root level intervention to get a
domain go dark.

It makes me wonder what might have happened if the domain had been a
delegation in uk.com? Would the .com Registry as a US organisation be
obliged to turn off uk.com which has tens of thousands of individually
owned sub-delegations because there are a few domains under uk.com
that the US disagrees with or how about under .com itself. I can quite
clearly reach www.cuba.com from my breakfast table this morning to
help me limber up to say hola for a salsa and fat larranaga in old
havana?

I hope ICANN is intervening as the industry regulator of its registrar
ENOM and if necessary educate ENOM and the US authorities to make sure
that these domains are restored either through ENOM or if this is not
possible re-delegate them to a non US registrar.



Christian

On 6 Mar 2008, at 02:03, ip () v2 listbox com wrote:

> ________________________________________
> From: Tom Cross [tom () memestreams net]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 8:08 PM
> To: David Farber
> Subject: A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears
>
> For IP:
>
> Should US trade embargoes apply to DNS registrars, where the activity
> being prohibited is primarily speech?
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/us/04bar.html
>
> By ADAM LIPTAK
> Published: March 4, 2008
> Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he
> sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including
> Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks
> to the United States government...
>
> It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall’s Web sites had been put on
> a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American
> domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall
> said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury
> Department; the company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned
> that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.
>
> Either way, there is no dispute that eNom shut down Mr. Marshall’s
> sites without notifying him and has refused to release the domain
> names to him....
>
> Susan Crawford, a visiting law professor at Yale and a leading
> authority on Internet law, said the fact that many large domain name
> registrars are based in the United States gives the Treasury’s Office
> of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, control “over a great deal of
> speech — none of which may be actually hosted in the U.S., about the
> U.S. or conflicting with any U.S. rights.”
>
> “OFAC apparently has the power to order that this speech disappear,”
> Professor Crawford said...


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