[Rt4-whois] Uncle Sam: If It Ends in .Com, It’s .Seizable

[Omar Kaminski]

Dear RT, I believe this issue could also "raises eyebrows" at some
point on Whois and compliance.

Best,
Omar



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

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

By David Kravets March 6, 2012 |

When U.S. authorities shuttered sports-wagering site Bodog.com last
week, it raised eyebrows across the net because the domain name was
registered with a Canadian company, ostensibly putting it beyond the
reach of the U.S. government. Working around that, the feds went
directly to VeriSign, a U.S.-based internet backbone company that has
the contract to manage the coveted .com and other “generic” top-level
domains.

EasyDNS, an internet infrastructure company, protested that the
“ramifications of this are no less than chilling and every single
organization branded or operating under .com, .net, .org, .biz etc.
needs to ask themselves about their vulnerability to the whims of U.S.
federal and state lawmakers.”

But despite EasyDNS and others’ outrage, the U.S. government says it’s
gone that route hundreds of times. Furthermore, it says it has the
right to seize any .com, .net and .org domain name because the
companies that have the contracts to administer them are based on
United States soil, according to Nicole Navas, an Immigration and
Customs Enforcement spokeswoman.

The controversy highlights the unique control the U.S. continues to
hold over key components of the global domain name system, and rips a
Band-Aid off a historic sore point for other nations. A complicated
web of bureaucracy and Commerce Department-dictated contracts signed
in 1999 established that key domains would be contracted out to
Network Solutions, which was acquired by VeriSign in 2000. That
cemented control of all-important .com and .net domains with a U.S.
company – VeriSign – putting every website using one of those
addresses firmly within reach of American courts regardless of where
the owners are located – possibly forever.

The government, Navas said, usually serves court-ordered seizures on
VeriSign, which manages domains ending in .com, .net, .cc, .tv and
.name, because “foreign-based registrars are not bound to comply with
U.S. court orders.” The government does the same with the non-profit
counterpart to VeriSign that now manages the .org domain. That’s the
Public Interest Registry, which, like VeriSign, is based in Virginia.

Such seizures are becoming commonplace under the Obama administration.
For example, the U.S. government program known as Operation in Our
Sites acquires federal court orders to shutter sites it believes are
hawking counterfeited goods, illegal sports streams and unauthorized
movies and music. Navas said the U.S. government has seized 750 domain
names, “most with foreign-based registrars.”

VeriSign, for its part, said it is complying with U.S. law.

“VeriSign responds to lawful court orders subject to its technical
capabilities,” the company said in a statement. “When law enforcement
presents us with such lawful orders impacting domain names within our
registries, we respond within our technical capabilities.”

VeriSign declined to entertain questions about how many times it has
done this. It often complies with U.S. court orders by redirecting the
DNS (Domain Name System) of a domain to a U.S. government IP address
that informs online visitors that the site has been seized (for
example, ninjavideo.net.)

“Beyond that, further questions should be directed to the appropriate
U.S. federal government agency responsible for the domain name
seizure,” the company said.

The Public Interest Registry did not immediately respond for comment.

Bodog.com was targeted because federal law generally makes it illegal
to offer online sports wagering and to payoff online bets in the
United States, even though online gambling isn’t illegal globally.

Bodog.com was registered with a Canadian registrar, a VeriSign
subcontractor, but the United States shuttered the site without any
intervention from Canadian authorities or companies.

Instead, the feds went straight to VeriSign. It’s a powerful company
deeply enmeshed in the backbone operations of the internet, including
managing the .com infrastructure and operating root name servers.
VeriSign has a cozy relationship with the federal government, and has
long had a contract from the U.S. government to help manage the
internet’s “root file” that is key to having a unified internet name
system.

Still, the issue of the U.S.’s legal dominion claim over all .com
domains wasn’t an issue in the January seizure of the domain of
megaupload.com, which is implicated in one of the largest criminal
copyright cases in U.S. history. Megaupload.com was registered in the
United States with a registrar based in Washington state.

The United States would have won even more control over the internet
with the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. But the
nation’s biggest online protest ever scuttled the measures, which
would have allowed the government to force internet service providers
in the U.S. to prevent Americans from being able to visit or find in
search engines websites that the U.S. government suspected violated
U.S. copyright or trademark law.

But as the Justice Department demonstrated forcefully with the
takedown of Megaupload, just a day after the net’s coordinated
anti-SOPA protest, it still has powerful weapons to use, despite the
deaths of SOPA and PIPA.

So how does International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers,
the global body that oversees the domain-naming system, feel about the
U.S. government’s actions? ICANN declined comment and forwarded a 2010
blog post from it’s chief Rod Beckstrom, who said ICANN has “no
involvement in the takedown of any website.”

ICANN, a non-profit established by the U.S., has never awarded a
contract to manage the .com space to a company outside the United
States — in fact VeriSign has always held it — despite having a
contentious relationship with ICANN that’s involved a protracted
lawsuit. But, due to contract terms, VeriSign is unlikely to ever lose
control over the immensely economically valuable .com handle.

ICANN is also seeking to distance itself from the U.S. government by
being more inclusive, including allowing domain names in a range of
written, global languages, ending the exclusivity of the Latin
alphabet in top-level domains.

Still, many outside the United States, like China, India and Russia,
distrust ICANN and want control of the net’s naming system to be
turned over to an organization such as the International
Telecommunications Union, an affiliate of the United Nations. Last
year, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met with Hamadoun Toure,
the ITU’s chief, and said he wanted international control over the
internet “using the monitoring capabilities of the International
Telecommunication Union.”

“If we are going to talk about the democratization of international
relations, I think a critical sphere is information exchange and
global control over such exchange,” Putin said, according to a
transcript from the Russian government.

Just last week, Robert McDowell, a Federal Communications Commission
commissioner, blasted such an idea.

“If successful, these efforts would merely imprison the future in the
regulatory dungeon of the past,” he said. “Even more counterproductive
would be the creation of a new international body to oversee internet
governance.”

ICANN was established in 1998 by the Clinton administration, and has
been under global attack to internationalize the control of the Domain
Name System ever since. A United Nations working group in 2005
concluded that “no single government should have a pre-eminent role in
relation to international internet governance.”

But those pressures don’t seem to have registered with President
Barack Obama’s Justice Department. Hollywood was a big donor to Obama,
and Obama reciprocated by naming at least five former Recording
Industry Association of America attorneys to posts in the Justice
Department, which has been waging a crackdown on internet piracy. The
Justice Department is looking for even more money in next year’s
budget to hire more intellectual-property prosecutors.

Without SOPA or PIPA, the Justice Department lacks any mechanism to
prevent Americans from visiting sites that are on a domain not
controlled by a U.S. corporation. Knowing that, the world’s leading
BitTorrent site, The Pirate Bay, recently switched its main site from
a .org domain to .se, the handle for Sweden.

The Pirate Bay’s lead is unlikely to be followed by the millions of
non-U.S. companies that rely on .com, which remains the net’s
beachfront real estate, even if it is subject to being confiscated by
the U.S.

But it is possible that the U.S. government’s big-footing over dot-com
domains in the name of fighting copyright could add more weight to the
arguments of those who want to put the U.N. in charge of the
internet’s naming system. While that’s not inevitably a bad thing, it
could lead to a world where any .com might be seizable by any country,
including Russia, Libya and Iran.

Still, don’t expect Uncle Sam to give up its iron grip on .com without a fight.