White supremacist forum site Stormfront seized by domain hosts | Hacker News Reader

White supremacist forum site Stormfront seized by domain hosts

knoxnews.com

11 pointsfooey10 comments

This is scary more than interesting in my opinion. First let me say, I am not addressing this issue in the context of free speech. That issue has been rehashed on HN over and over. Instead, I am questioning these actions from the context of the power that Network Solutions is exercising in taking down and essentially seizing a website. Short of having a court order, which is not made clear, I am stunned that this is able to take place.

>The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has claimed responsibility for the site's removal. Executive Director Kristen Clarke said in an email that the nonprofit group has "taken action against Stormfront."

A nonprofit has "taken action against Stormfront." What kind of action has it taken that allows it to have a site in essence seized and taken down?

This should be a concern to an business that has an internet presence that may have a difference of opinion with any other person/organization. While I do not agree with Stormfront or their rhetoric, I also do not agree with seizing a website from its owner without some type of legal action or court order to do so. More needs to be said on what happened here or we should all be concerned about these actions.

>A nonprofit has "taken action against Stormfront." What kind of action has it taken that allows it to have a site in essence seized and taken down?

Sending a bunch of abuse emails tends to work.

>This should be a concern to an business that has an internet presence that may have a difference of opinion with any other person/organization. While I do not agree with Stormfront or their rhetoric, I also do not agree with seizing a website from its owner without some type of legal action or court order to do so. More needs to be said on what happened here or we should all be concerned about these actions.

This happens 1000s of times every day, but people only seem to be worried when it's Nazi sites that get taken down. Nobody gets worried when domain registrars shut down 1000s of "malware" and "phishing" domains every day with little to no verification based on abuse reports from automated scripts

As I said, this has nothing to do with whose site was removed nor am I addressing the concept of free speech, I was only asking about the ability to take down a website and someone such as Netwoek Solutions to seize it and refuse to release it to be moved to another host. I am not speaking specifically about Stormfront as I don't know anything about them beyond what the article posits. I was saying we should be concerned when a site can be taken down and the domain seized without further information.

You state that it happens 1,000 times a day. You certainly know more than me on this, but in these cases is the domain frozen or seized? It just seems there was more to the story than was told.

>You state that it happens 1,000 times a day. You certainly know more than me on this, but in these cases is the domain frozen or seized? It just seems there was more to the story than was told.

Okay so, this article was written by monkeys. Author interprets "clientTransferProhibited" and a bunch of other irrelevant flags as the domain being seized, which isn't at all what these mean. The only domain status flag relevant here is the "clientHold".

This domain wasn't "seized", it's a normal clientHold. Stormfront can still transfer to another registrar, but on some registrars that can be a little tricky. For a domain seizure generally you'd expect to see "serverHold", whois lizardsquad.org for example.

Thank you for that explanation. I was confused by the wording of the article.

It's not really clear, but if you read the attached material in their letter, there's kind of three things that stuck out to me:

1. The LCCRUL seems to have contacted NS and complained about Stormfront. A NS representative initially claimed they would not do anything about Stormfront.

2. The LCCRUL seems to have pushed back with the argument that Stormfront was violating NS's own acceptable use policy and NS was not enforcing it.

3. NS's acceptable use policy explicitly states they can do what they did if it is violated.

I'm not a lawyer, but one thing our organization has been told by lawyers (about totally different issues) is that violating your own policies is kind of setting yourself up in a major way for liability in certain situations. I'm not sure what that liability would be in this case, but you could speculate that it might be that NS could get sued for being arbitrary and capricious in enforcing certain acceptable use policies in other situations, or could be held liable for certain things resulting from Stormfront's activities. The general vibe I've gotten is that when it comes to liability, you shouldn't have internal policies you're not willing to enforce completely.

From this perspective, NS's hands might have been tied by the policy they adopted more than anything else.

The seizure part seems to stem naturally from them just following their policy.

Thank you for such a reasoned response as that clarifies it a bit.

Ultimately what he says remains true: private companies aren't compelled to let somebody use their services. This makes it all the more important, in my opinion, not necessarily to keep trying to reform or care about how private companies handle various things, but rather for public institutions (those under public control, roughly speaking), to continue to provide a public, non-internet way to engage with those institutions. For example, a lot of local governments now, you get the sense they won't pay attention to you unless you go (or threaten to go) on Twitter. So at that point having a Twitter account is a prerequisite for democracy a little bit. I mean Twitter's fine and all, but what if you run afoul of their terms of service somehow, or what if they simply invoke their right to refuse service to anyone? Neither of those has anything to do with your rights as a citizen, and shouldn't affect them.

This is interesting, if only because the domain registrar hasn't dropped the domain or site, but outright disabled it so the site owners can't access it. Wonder what kind of legal threat they could have received that caused the domain registrar to do that?

I think it's obvious that we are seeing an organized campaign against white nationalists and the alt-right, and even against some ordinary nationalists and conservatives.

From YouTube, to Paypal, to Patreon, to GoDaddy, to Cloudflare, to Google, to Airbnb, to Discord, to Twitter, etc, etc. It's too much and too quick not to be at least partly organized by some group(s) or entity.

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