Texas Locked a Foreign Company's Domain over Missing Digital ID Checks

> The objection is not that the order is lawless, but that the .com registry on American soil hands American courts a switch for the whole internet, and a Travis County judge has now thrown it.

> [...] American infrastructure, with its supposed First Amendment protections, are of no use here when a Texas judge can order a site taken down for hosting legal content, because it did not introduce digital ID features.

Does this mean almost everybody has to arrange alternate domain names now (under alternate DNS jurisdictions) to avoid their online presence being totally destroyed by the whim of any US state—even ones they don't even do business in?

This isn't how things are supposed to work, dangit...

I've always been bothered by the level of centralization that the DNS system brings to the internet. I agree that it shouldn't be possible in principle for a random court in Texas to shut down a foreign website; but insofar as the .com domain name is in fact run by a US company and US courts can issue orders to US companies, any institution anywhere in the world that relies on a .com domain as its authoritative name is making itself de-facto subject to any US court.

There are alternative DNS roots, various projects to encode human-meaningful names in blockchains like ENS - all of which have the problem that no one actually uses them; standard DNS has all the network effect.

There’s a dire need to have an independent domain tld, things are going in the wrong direction and unless there’s a domain tld free from any of these shenanigans, everything else you do is still conditional to get suspended or banned or whatever, so running away from social media to have your own blog won’t mean anything soon, hosting your own than a vps will mean nothing too, same goes with not relying on xyz cdn or service, because your tld will be taken overnight.

No, .onion doesn’t count.

> taking it down worldwide until it posts a $9.14 million bond and builds an age verification digital ID system to the state's own specification

The internet was nice while it lasted.

Losing their .com is probably the least of their worries, there are plenty of shady TLDs to pick from. Their headquarters in NL got raided and servers seized last month.