plaggypig

There's a shit storm brewing in the UK over the Labour government's new Digital Economy Bill, which is a nothing short of a declaration of war against the Internet - besides giving the government unlimited powers in respect to The War On Copyright Piracy, it has shocking implications for domain registries based in the UK, namely Nominet (the .uk ccTLD registry, who negotiated these provisions behind closed doors) and Telnic (the .tel TLD registry, regulated by ICANN).

See Telnic's official statement for details.

I urge UK domainers to write to their MPs and join the Open Rights Group.

domainerd1

This appears to be a movement worldwide. Politicians in general don't like the freedom that the Internet represents. Even our beloved Obama! has designs on making the Internet in the US less free of governmental interference. Sad because, for the most part, the Internet has been a huge success without the help of politicians - Al Gore, included.

plaggypig

Nominet claims these powers are unlikely to ever be used, but how many times have we heard that before? We have local councils using terrorism legislation to investigate dog foulers and people who put their bins out at the wrong time!

It's rather worrying that the Digital Britain report says, "There have however been reported abuses of the domain name system such as cyber-squatting, drop catching ..."

So according to the government registering domain names that have expired is abusive.

Jaco

It seems to be one of those scary examples of clueless people at the levers of ppower making a decision based on something they know absolutely nothing about.

Politicians do it all the time, on pretty much every issue they touch. The best you can hope for is a genuinely objective person who is smart enough to realize that they know nothing, seek out both sides and make an objective decision as best they can, based on whatever information they were able to gather up before voting.... What you usually wind up with, though, is vein, blowhard politicos creating the illusion of knowledge by hijacking relevant industry terms and purporting themselves to be in the know, when really, all they "know" are a few hand-picked tech terms and absolutely nothing else.

Calling drop-catching an "abuse" is just so totally absurd to those of us who actually understand how the system works, but to know-nothings, it's just another adjective they can add to the pile in their effort to appear knowledgeable.

I hate- *HATE* - politicians. The greatest failing of democracy is that it draws a 'certain type' of person into politics who is almost always the least qualified personality type to be making good decisions.

Ms Domainer

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Well, such a move was inevitable, and you can expect more of the same, I'm afraid.

The internet, ICANN, and registries have done such a poor job of policing from within. Corruption, corruption, and more corruption.

Any day of the week, you can find auction platforms selling TM domains with no oversight at all, not to mention the Snapnames scandal.

Of course governments want their slice of the pie.

This is just the beginning, kiddies.


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gazzip

LOL, It sure does seem that way in the UK and its getting worse by the day since joining (or was it press ganged into) the eu



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abdussamad

Its not as if there is freedom online anyway. Most web hosts have so many conditions attached to their hosting that infringe on freedom of speech. They can take any website down at any time over the most minor things.

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malcarada

The British Government has a proven record of using legislation passed in order to fight a legitimate concern to fight something very different from what they said the law was needed for.

Antiterrorist laws have been used recently to stop peaceful antiwar or anticlimate change protesters, searching Google for this will quickly come up with something.

BTW, if the problem is the EU, that should not be, the UK is welcome to leave the EU whenever they please, they still have no abolished elections as far as I know.

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Domagon

Such policies could potentially affect .com, .net, .org, etc gTLDs too, since jurisdiction is determined by registrant / registrar locations NOT the location of the registry. To be clear, I'm referring to gTLDs only.

So for example, if a UK resident registrers a domain with a UK based registrar in say the .COM gTLD, despite that registry being based in the U.S., could potentially have their .COM domain seized under such a UK law.

This is another reason that registrar location for gTLDs matters.

Ron

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onspec

Time for registrars to relocate to where the real money (international gaming) is, First Nations territory in Canada.

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