https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac...
Unfortunately for the government, I suspect abusing control of domains like this will just make a decentralized DNS that they cannot control more of a reality.
Citation required.
(EDIT: to be clear, it seems that we require a citation to the official Iranian policy, not some clear agitprop around a popular slogan ...)
I wonder if McCain meant his death chant literally:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7s5pT3Rris
Its probably a good thing he didn't get a chance to set official US policy on Iran.
EDIT: /s
And he was a United States senator for 30 years, including a Chair of the Armed Services Committee. How much more involved in setting America's international policy could one be?
> Death to America (Persian: مرگ بر آمریکا Marg bar Āmrikā) is an anti-American political slogan and chant which has been in use in Iran since the inception of the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
Official Government Policy > populist slogans.
> Ayatollah Khomeini, the first leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, popularized the term.
It would still be weird even if it were the .us TLD though. State censorship is state censorship.
But to be honest, with all the new TLDs, there's no longer anything really special about the .com/net/org domains anymore.
ICANN is based in the US so they can theoretically turn off any domain they want.
Also are you suggesting it's OK for the US to shutdown any website engaging in whatever the US government defines as "anti-US activities?"
> Have we already forgotten Iran and their calls for death to America?
I'd love to see the proof you have that these websites were bannering "death to America" across their websites.
Unless you have some special knowledge about the situation I don't, I think we can safely say we don't know if any of the accusations the US is making about these websites are even true.
Please tell us more about this. Which ir and ru domains have been seized by the US lately?
The internet being administered by US corporations makes them easily compellable and any property they steward can be seized despite being for the benefit of foreign citizens and non-residents.
Just read the article and scan some of the websites in a cache.
Reading your comment, after reading the US's claim in the article, and looking at the websites, leads me to believe your comment is straight disinformation.
US claim, "Today, we successfully seized 92 domains involved in a disinformation campaign conducted by Iran-based actors to promote pro-Iranian propaganda."
Looking at a cross-section of the domains in archive.org, shows them to contain one-sided and incomplete information.
Freedom of speech is not simply being able to wear a Pepsi shirt in downtown Atlanta, but about viewpoints that necessarily make us uncomfortable. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". That so many are willing to discard our hard-earned freedoms for the lure of simplistic neo-fascism [0] is harrowing. Our society has been whipped into a stupor by the specter of foreign strawmen, while the real threats to the US are the domestic powers doing the whipping. If you can't see how this action is utterly anti-American, you are contributing to our destruction.
[0] One telltale indicator of neo-fascism is the analogizing of state activity to business activity.
The original submission mentions that the issue was the IRGC was pretending to be a genuine new outlet, which is exactly what the FARA describes.
Link from one of the provided domains: https://web.archive.org/web/20200308072511/http://newsstand7...
I provided a link in my original comment to demonstrate there's accusations that this exact thing has been done historically in the case of FARA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac...
The flip side is that anyone being punished can argue they are being selectively targeted, regardless of the validity of it.
None of the examples there show the punishment of speech the US government disagrees with. Furthermore, none of them are analogous to the original post, where a foreign government was pretending to be legitimate news organizations.
On the other hand, if the US accuses IRGC of controlling all these websites but does nothing about the multi-billion dollar lobbying organization in the US that's had multiple high ranking officials demanding it register with NARA (and then later mysteriously dropping their demands), does that not strike you as a bit odd?
The IRGC was pretending to be American news organizations, which is entirely different in kind from AIPAC.