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Comment by sammcd | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone understand how domain seizing technically works? What are they actually doing?

Whois'ing the domain shows the nameservers are with GoDaddy. Is it so simple that they are just asking GoDaddy to change the site to this image?

I was going to assume that the government used ICANN to point it to their own name servers. Anyway, I'm just curious and would love if someone could shine some light on this.

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they are not doing it at the Registrar level(by contacting the registrar for the domain and forcing them to update the authoritative name server info to point to NS1.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM, NS2.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM), but rather through the agency who controls the top level domain. In this case, all the “seized domains” appear to be .com and the agency/company who has the ICANN contract for this TLD is VeriSign(which also controls .net TLD).

More details can be found here: http://rulingclass.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/the-background-d...

Thanks, that is exactly what I was looking for.

Registrant: Seized Domains ATTN SEIZEDSERVERS.COM care of Network Solutions PO Box 459 Drums, PA. US 18222

   Domain Name: SEIZEDSERVERS.COM

   Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
      Solutions, IT                
      ATTN SEIZEDSERVERS.COM
      care of Network Solutions
      PO Box 459
      Drums, PA 18222
      US
      570-708-8780
      
   Record expires on 24-Nov-2011.
   Record created on 24-Nov-2010.

   Domain servers in listed order:

   NS1.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM        74.81.170.109
   NS2.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM        74.81.170.108

Isn't this why the ICANN contract for a TLD should not belong to an American corporation? Logically, it should go a company in Switzerland, who have traditionally handled such things, and continue to be perceived as low in corruption [1] and high in democracy [2], with strong property rights [3]. They tend to be neutral in wars, and are not part of the EU (which is probably a bad idea for an independent TLD.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index [3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Property_Rights_I...

Why not just register a .ch domain then?

Heh, guess you can change the A record of a name without having to update the whois info. All of these domains are just pointed to http://74.81.170.110/

since .com/.net/.org are controlled by US companies, is the next step (for blogs/sites such as these) to move to .ru? or some other company not controlled by US companies?

Bingo.

How does this work with ICANN being an American organisation controlling the . server?

ICANN can shut down all of a ccTLD or none of it; such a penalty is too large to ever use.

if you're going for a non com/net/org domain, I'm assuming you'd have to register it with a company that's not US based too, so no ordering .nl domains through Godaddy, cause that can still cause problems.

There's no reason to use GoDaddy - there are plenty of other registrars.

I never understood why GoDaddy has some form of monopolly in the US. Personally I use Domaindiscount24 (based in Germany) for my domains.

Ironically some have moved to China (.hk) for their internet freedom.

NB: .hk is TLD for Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region). While .cn is TLD for mainland China.

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