Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwatdem12311 | Hacker News Reader

So if I don’t do business in Texas, have no operations in Texas or otherwise deal with Texas in any way a state court should just be able to order a company to suspend my whole domain?

I’m Canadian and Texas courts have zero authority over me so they can f*ck off.

View on HN

But they do have authority over the domain registrar, so you’re vulnerable there no matter where you live.

I don’t agree with the premise of age verification, but of course a prosecutor would go after the assets they can reach if enforcing local laws. They’ve done this for years when it comes to copyright infringement.

It's a huge overreach to say that any individual US state has authority over a domain registrar, and even more specifically over .COM as a TLD, given its history with VeriSign and the US federal government.

There exists a well defined process, precedent and prior case law in US federal court to seize a .COM domain name by a court order issued to VeriSign. Doing this at the state level is entirely new.

Well that's an interesting question. Where is the owner of .com headquartered? Because presumably that state's courts do have jurisdiction. Which if you stop and think about it is entirely arbitrary and really drives home what a poor system ICANN DNS is on a fundamental level.

Verisign is headquartered in Reston, VA

Verisign is HQ’d in Virginia and motherless is in the Netherlands. It is absolutey absurd that a state court in Texas should be able to order the complete suspension of this domain. At best they should be able order ISPs to block it in Texas.

> But they do have authority over the domain registrar

Why do you say that?

They do not

Reply on news.ycombinator.com