Hacker News Reader

Comment by zacharycohn | Hacker News Reader

GoDaddy may not have fought very hard for Jotform, but I'm pretty sure any US registrar would be hard pressed to the US Government saying "Turn off this website or else."

View on HN

Or else what?

If there's an actual law and due process, ok. If people are just supposed to automatically comply because somebody in a government agency says so...well, I hope we haven't sunk that far.

At this point it seems negligent at best to host your site on a US or US ally based registrar

...or on a .com, .net or .org tld, since "having a business connection with Verisign" is enough to put you under US jurisdiction. Apparently.

The USA judicial system might think you are under their juristiction, but your local juristicion might disagree.

I can't wait till they cross the line, and block some .com, then a group in that (non-US) country gets local injunctions forcing it to resolve. It could split DNS or wrestle it out of US control.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Rojadirecta.org

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/court-refuses-give-sei...

The domain has still not been returned.

That's assuming your local jurisdiction has a spine. I have multiple .com and .net domains all done through Canadian registars, for the sole purpose of not wanting to deal with the BS that is going on down south. If what I'm reading is true, they can be pulled offline whenever someone gives the word go and they're gone. I have no faith that the local courts will do anything of use, especially with the current government that we have. I'd be hard pressed to think of any western nation that would.

Let's not get out of hand here. This didn't happen because it was in the US, this happened because the domain was on GoDaddy.

Having your domain hosted with a reasonable registrar would have been enough to prevent this.

Not saying this is what we would do (as a registrar) but an order from the government generally has a time stamp on it where you can verify the "order" and then comply. While I can't get into the time period allowed or any details like that I can say that it would be possible to alert the registrant and/or stall the request if one so chooses to do that. I'm not saying we would do this of course. I'm just saying that getting an order from the US Government, unless it appears on it's face to be a true emergency situation, a registrar could always take the time to check with legal counsel.

And if it were a true emergency the Government would go straight to Verisign (for .com/net) and not even bother with the registrar.

Do we have any evidence that the US Govt pressured them?

The fact that the secret service are involved? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3597821

Fair enough, although that wasn't posted at the time I made that comment (which is why I asked).

Although to be fair, the SS just made a request, and GoDaddy had no responsibility to comply, they did so on their own accord without any type of process.

In my book, it's GoDaddy's responsibility to do the right thing, not the SS' responsibility to not complain. If they would have been with a reasonable registrar, this would not have happened.

This is exactly what I thought. I think SS just emailed GoDaddy and GoDaddy just shut down everything. Everyone is moving to different registrars, mainly NameCheap, I just hope they will be able to stand up for their users and ask for a court order. If other registrars start to shut down at the whim of the US Government, then we might have to move to registrars overseas. Unfortunately, that doesn't even seem safe to me, since there has been news of US pressuring other governments to put out SOPA-like laws. There is also the case of the British kid who was extradited to US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com