New Bill Could Allow U.S. Government to Shut Down Domain Names

thats good and bad, dont like how they have the power to decide but its good bc spam and bs sites will be banished to the abyss

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I'm not surprised.

This industry has done very little to police itself, so the government has stepped in. Had this industry been more proactive, perhaps the government would have stayed out.

Closing down spam and scam sites is a good thing, but government intervention could result in the slippery slope of censorship: if the gov becomes too heavy handed, this could end up in the Supreme Court.

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What you forget though is that the Federal Government writes the Supreme Court's check! This is not going to end well.

Once the Gov. is given the power to monitor the internet, we will eventually lose the internet as we know it. 30 to 50 years from now, you'll see.

Called it!

ToryC103 said:

30 to 50 years from now, you'll see.

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30 to 50 years from now

Isn't this what Google already does in its capacity as supreme ruler and sovereign which will only allow people to see what it wants them to see?

What right does America think it has to start throwing their weight around though? They did not invent the internet as it is now and lets face facts here, they are years behind more advanced countries in the East.

It's all good! The music industry would be dead otherwise in the years to come...I am glad the government is stepping forward finally

sdsinc said:

30 to 50 years from now

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Maybe less.

Illegal activity is illegal activity whether it is breaking into a home and destroying goods or breaking into a computer. If it is illegal then shit it down.

This kind of thing goes on every day. Did any of you read about the "Terrorist TV bill"?

It has some serious implications when you call Satellite providers Terrorist organizations (more so when some providers are partially state funded)

I'm not here to get into a debate about Terrorists vs US. I just want to point out that media in all forms is always subject to government interference despite what you may believe.

Hamas Has Been Dealt Blow to its Terrorist TV Station

Middle East Online

The thing is though Rich, where is the line drawn to censorship? It is one thing to want people to pay a ridiculous premium for ebooks that have no mailing or distribution fees at the same price or more than physical books or the insane fees that itunes charges to watch an episode of your favourite show but some responsibility has to be taken by the publishers here.

Take Big Bang Theory just as an example, it would cost me nearly £60 to watch all the episodes of one season.

That is just insane and a complete rip off.

It has gone beyond piracy now and has descended into idiocy, the world has moved on from where we could all be bullied into accepting any price a company wants to put on a product or the 500% mark up a shop wants, we do not have to pay for distribution costs now...

So why the high prices??!

Until the owners of these companies figure out that the way things USED to be done has finished this battle will still rage.

Now, if the American government in all its infantile temper tantrums wants to shut down one site, then they certainly will not stop there...they will have precedent and a clear reason to step in at any time to protect the interests of a few bloated companies and the bribes.

If these television companies want me to sit through a few minutes of adverts then I will gladly do it to watch programmes legally, and anyone else would from the official source, but all they can see is the way they used to do it. (which does not exist any more)

Sparhawke said:

So why the high prices??!

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Domains cost $8-$99 to register for the common extensions.

What are YOU adding to the equation for end users when you charge more?
Some have over a 1,000,000% markup!

Perhaps I could figure out how to hack a registrar and take them because I don't see why I should pay more than regFee.

It's a tough debate to win.

Federal agents shut down these sites this summer and didnt need a fancy new law to do it.

tvshack.net
movies-links.tv
filespump.com
now-movies.com
planetmoviez.com
thepiratecity.org
zml.com

johname said:

Federal agents shut down these sites this summer and didnt need a fancy new law to do it......

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Correct.... they are required already to regulate communications by wire and only wanted there to be some type notice before they began enforcing the laws they are currently ignoring.

THE SKY IS FALLING ON "OPEN INTERNET".

"OPEN INTERNET" will NO LONGER EXIST by next year.

I can't believe this would be all that effective in the long run.

Many of the piracy and counterfeit sites would simply move to oversea registrars and increase their use of bulletproof registrars.

And even though the bill would allow the US to go after countries with the offending registrar, unless that country has a similar law or is affected by the counterfeiting or piracy, I don't see it going anywhere. The FBI, Secret Service and US Postal Inspectors can't even get cooperation from other countries many times for outright fraud and phishing attacks. What makes them think that country will care about counterfeits?

This is about the music, film, gambling and pharma industries.
They will make many sites inaccessible from the U.S. without any court order.

This will allow registrars making deals with industry representing organisations like it was done recently between enom and legitscript (details here).

What is going to happen is those industries (music, film, gambling and pharma) are going to tell the registrars what domains should be suspended. This has already started.

There was this very important thread recently:
http://www.namepros.com/warnings-and-alerts/680057-beware-enom-namecheap-suspend-domains-based.html

---------- Post added at 03:53 AM ---------- Previous post was at 03:43 AM ----------

THX said:

FBI, Secret Service and US Postal Inspectors

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This is not about those agencies. This is about the organisations that represent a certain industry telling the registrars what music sites should have their domain suspended or getting banned in the U.S.

In Turkey each year over 1000 sites are made inaccessible nationwide with a DNS and IP ban. In 2009, 6000 domains were banned. There is an organisation that represents the music industry and they decide what sites should be shut down. Considering that the exact same is planned in the U.S. we are talking about a few thousand domains per industry.

The worst thing is those DNS bans make the domain unusable forever. Even if the domain expires and is picked by somebody else it doesn't work.

THX said:

I can't believe this would be all that effective in the long run.

Many of the piracy and counterfeit sites would simply move to oversea registrars and increase their use of bulletproof registrars.

And even though the bill would allow the US to go after countries with the offending registrar, unless that country has a similar law or is affected by the counterfeiting or piracy, I don't see it going anywhere. The FBI, Secret Service and US Postal Inspectors can't even get cooperation from other countries many times for outright fraud and phishing attacks. What makes them think that country will care about counterfeits?

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Well, Verisign (.com and .net) are located in the U.S., so all Verisign domains would be affected, no matter where the servers and registrars are located.

The U.S. may not have jurisdiction over off-shore registrars and servers, but what happens to your site when your domain name is disabled?



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I think for domains registered with registrars outside the U.S. they will ban the domain and the IP in the U.S.

This ban works with DNS. This means no matter what IP your domain is supposed to be connected, it won't work in the U.S. This also means if people try to bypass the domain by typing the IP it still won't work.

In other words even sites like thepiratebay.org won't be accessible in the U.S. but they will work fine in other countries.

They already do this but it's a lengthy and costly task. This bill just makes it easier.

Closer to Socialism

If the government censored domain names, I would just move to China. At least the economy is more promising there. It seems that everyday, we are moving closer and closer to socialism and *not saying that it's Obama, but its Obama. Censoring domain names will do nothing except frustrate the American people.

this is like the war on drugs. It costs $7 to register a name and then whatever it takes to program it and get it up and running. then the US gov't has to pay its attorneys/agents $100s of thousands to shut down this stuff. The economics dont work in the long run. what effect on our social values I dont know.

With this just block domains from the US? What if it is registered in another country?

DomainOutlaw said:

With this just block domains from the US? What if it is registered in another country?

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If the domain is a .com or .net, it could be banned because VeriSign controls these TLDs, and VeriSign is located in the U.S.

If you ban the domain, you effectively ban the site.


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All I can say here is that I like the idea but I don't think I'd like its execution.

Ms Domainer said:

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Well, Verisign (.com and .net) are located in the U.S., so all Verisign domains would be affected, no matter where the servers and registrars are located.

The U.S. may not have jurisdiction over off-shore registrars and servers, but what happens to your site when your domain name is disabled?



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People will change domains and some boom will kick in instead of always typing .com people will start to always type something else
example domain.com would turn into some other tld outside america there will be something else no one gives up easy and america needs to learn they don't own the world they have to grow up and stop acting like their the best and taking charge of everything and crying wolf when something goes wrong.
Come on guys admit it .com is going to die soon its being pushed to its limits we can always use some other non u.s domain america can't control what happens elsewhere no country controls the world america thinks they can but they can't.
Do you honestly think that people making $5000 a day from making people click on one ad to watch a movie are going to give up their $275,000/yr per site income when they could have 6 or 7 sites?they're not because the information used to track them down would be gained via privacy invasion and therefore they can counter sue.
Sony and a few other recording labels tried to sue UPC)An ISP in ireland & uk) because they won't release their clients details and the irish court(forget which one of our courts) ruled in favour of UPC and the judge said that because the means of getting the information would be illegal sony has no basis for a court order.
I am pretty sure the same thing will be said and done in other countries sure the turkish download alot and they have the biggest army they could easily go to war with america and win but they won't because they are responsible unlike america.