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Comment by battaile | Hacker News Reader

While I'm sorry this happened to you, and I'm as anti-SOPA as anyone (have called my congress(wo)man, called Boehner and Canter when it looked like they were going to sneak the vote through last week), this has nothing to do with SOPA, and trying to invoke the name for something that you should've been better prepared for is kind of a discredit to the cause.

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I disagree, using this as an example of what can happen under SOPA is useful. It shows a real-world example NOW of what can happen in the future. The situation is different but close enough, a third-party decided they didn't like his content and somebody took steps to remove his domain from the Internet, even though no one involved had absolutely anything to do with the content on the domain in the first place.

I agree. It's good to have real world examples so people can see what can happen under SOPA, but I feel with or without SOPA, DNS providers and hosts are going to make stupid mistakes. I do feel that this sort of blanket "we're shutting you down without contacting you" approach is very scary and frustrating, and I think we all fear it could be very common place with SOPA. Bluehost should not have done anything to his domains without contacting him.

I also feel that maybe real-world examples of servers and domains being seized by the government, justified or not, might be more appropriate. Especially when the domains and hardware seized were due to potential copyright infringements and not overly-stringent spam rules.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/wyden-domain-seizur...

http://torrentfreak.com/feds-return-seized-domain-111208/

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/domain-seizures-def...

http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/11/25/doj.ice.seize....

The difference is that there is a recourse from this. You can call people and get it reversed. If SOPA goes through, you would have to go to court get it fixed.

This exactly the point I was trying to make -- this was a nightmare, but at least I could do something about it. The same exact thing could happen with SOPA, but instead of jumping registrars and getting things fixed, the situation would require court, and potentially fines and jail.

If SOPA passes, and this happened, we would be dead. Users won't wait around for months while the courts slog through a case, they'll just move to the next app.

I agree. I am anti-SOPA, but this is not censorship so much as an overzealous attempt to stop spam, executed poorly. Did they do a wildcard block/hold/whatever on a top level domain of yours *.mydomain.com so all your sub domains got blocked? I'm guessing some goober at bluehost just went one step farther than he should have in just removing the one DNS entry, and they definitely should have contacted you. Sounds like poor customer service.

And if SOPA passes you will see suspiciously simil overzealuos attempts to stop piracy. Same song, different verse but this time you get the federal government involved which is a whole new level of fun.

I agree http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3409045

This is true, and it makes me thing of all of the private sector solutions that are already available. The market creates the solutions and does not need government interference slowing it down or making dispute resolutions more complicated.

No hosting provider should ever modify customer DNS without the customer requesting.

Boycott Bluehost!

In the U.S., censorship will very likely travel under the guise of some "overzealous attempt" to stop this, that or the other.

SOPA's censorship problem is not the explicit endorsement of censorship but the precedent of mechanisms and principles that will make censorship far easier to implement and "justify".

Title reads "SOPA-like"?

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