Mexican Protest Site Censored by GoDaddy with the U.S. Embassy's Help | Hacker News Reader

Mexican Protest Site Censored by GoDaddy with the U.S. Embassy's Help

eff.org

220 pointsDondiego31 comments

GoDaddy has a long history of taking down sites at the mere "request" of some law enforcement agency, or even the request of another company without even the air of legal authority. [1] They tried to write themselves into SOPA as the recipient of domains confiscated by the government, and that led to one of the internet's more effective boycotts, with nearly 80,000 domains transferred out in 2011. Just two of the many reasons nobody should be entrusting the face of their business to this company.

1: http://www.alternet.org/story/47669/the_self-appointed_censo... , one of many examples.

Wow, a corrupt Mexican government convinces a corrupt American government to break its own laws take this site off of the internet. I am sad.

I'm going to take this at face value and assume you are, indeed, sad. I hope you are, because it is sad.

I am sad. This is a violation of not only our constitution, democracy in general and our civically engaged friends to our south. The message this unequivocally sends is, "Hey Mexican people who are trying to change shit, we don't have your back, at all."

And now they own Media Temple. It'll be interesting if they behave the same way with that company.

If Russia would have done the same it would be immediately called un-democratic and totalitarian, but if US does it - nobody notices.

> If Russia would have done the same it would be immediately called un-democratic and totalitarian, but if US does it - nobody notices.

I don't think so. I agree with your general sentiment, but this is mostly GoDaddy taking down sites when someone in government farts in their direction. In addition, I (and many others, I'm sure) already consider the US totalitarian.

Meanwhile, I hope people don't become outraged, I hope they do something. All the outrage in the world hasn't done shit for our civil liberties in the last 13 years.

> someone in government farts in their direction

Damn Obama and his crop dusting policy.

Perhaps few in the US.

US Government and foreign policy is generally viewed as being very hypocritical in the rest of the world (and we take the way that our leaders try to be lap-dogs of the US Government as extremely pathetic).

I personally think that most of the us foreign policy is considered un-democratic and totalitarian by many. I would not agree that nobody notices, people do notice. Some governments are opposed to it internationally but it's hard to protest too strongly without isolating yourself too much.

ICE/DOJ have been committing all sorts of nasty prior restraint. They got away with domain seizures against innocent websites simply accused of hosting copyrighted content. Over a year later they return the domains and don't even apologize. (Dajaz1.com is a great example of this.)

Prior restraint is one of the worst constitutional abuses with regards to the first amendment, because it causes irreparable harm. Hopefully defenses can be made in the courts against this behavior.

Likely in this case, ICE simply intimidated GoDaddy, which is a terrible company in the first place.

It pains me to hear Obama say that he wishes that the Ukrainian people (who have sacrificed so much to challenge their government) are righteous and should determine their own fate, when the US embassy is facilitating the censorship of opposition websites in Mexico and appointing a SOPA lobbyist to head up TPP Treaty negotiations. [0]

Yet again, doublespeak in crazy town.

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/03/obama-nominates-former...

After the SOPA fiasco, nobody should be doing business with GoDaddy. Back then I was recommended http://nearlyfreespeech.net/ and have been happy with their domain services thus far. Even though I don't have anything worthy of federal controversy being hosted, I'm a peace with my money going to a company that respects freedom of ALL speech.

As a side note. To most people here, politics are always accompanied by a nasty smell of corruption. During election day, poor people are offered shirts and tortas in exchange for their votes. I still see some people with t-shirts of the PRI from the elections two years ago. There is so much money involved, I remember some friends who would support the PRD, but would still work for the PRI because they were offered compensation. Although I have no way of proving it, it wouldn't surprise me if the USA had a certain level of involvement in Mexico. Actually, the contrary would be hard to believe.

Regarding the article, we still don't know at which level were the united states implicated, or if the takedown was even justified. Still smells like corruption.

You are correct that groups in the United States have had an enormous impact on Mexican politics. In 2003, Choicepoint was busted buying the secret Mexican voter files for the George W. Bush administration.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/05/colombia.usa

While Mexico does not have the resource curse, they are close by, in our time zones, and can provide massive labor exploitation if policies are tuned to make Mexicans desperate.

What was that ICANN arbitration decision that said that law enforcement requests are not enough, that there must be a court order? Who was the registrar that went to bat for the site owner?

Perhaps you're thinking of EasyDNS?

http://domainincite.com/15538-cops-cant-block-domain-transfe...

From the arbitration decision:

"Although there are compelling reasons why the request from a recognized law enforcement agency such as the City of London Police should be honored, the Transfer Policy is unambiguous in requiring a court order before a Registrar of Record may deny a request to transfer a domain name… The term “court order” is unambiguous and cannot be interpreted to be the equivalent of suspicion of wrong doing by a policy agency.

To permit a registrar of record to withhold the transfer of a domain based on the suspicion of a law enforcement agency, without the intervention of a judicial body, opens the possibility for abuse by agencies far less reputable than the City of London Police."

ICANN should pull GoDaddy's domain rights since they aren't following ICANN rules.

This is a good question, I want to know what registrar this is, sounds like a great place to park domains.

So, where can one get the information from the site? Seems like mirroring and distributing widely would be the Internet neighborly thing to do, and would help prevent future takedowns of similar nature (because if they are ineffectual in their purpose, or if they actually result in more awareness of the censored material, officials will think twice before this kind of censorship).

It is also available in archive.org ( https://web.archive.org/web/20130729163414/http://1dmx.org/ )

From the look of it, it seems this was an action taken by the US government as a favour to the Mexican ruling party (PRI, who is known for having the "Perfect Dictatorship" for 70 years, and now has returned).

Unfortunately, when it comes to doing any action against injustice, government oppression and corruption, Mexican society is even worse than the USA society.

The first link in the eff article is a mirror: http://www.op1d.mx/

Is it not counter-intuitive how the free market so freely allow government to pressure private companies into their bidding?

Not when the government pays them handsomely to do said bidding. (see Sprint and wiretapping fees...)

I don't understand why they would take this down. There are tons of sites that are critical or even insulting of the Mexican government, even main stream newspapers, and radio stations.

Probably because this site wasn't just besmirching them, it was helping organize protests.

Yes. Pretty much this.

The Mexican government is fine with everyone hating them, as long as people limit themselves to clicking the "like" button on facebook, or ranting about something, but as soon as there's the risk of people actually doing something, they start moving.

I will pull all the domains I can out of Godaddy and also recommend all I know in IT not to use them. We also remember Godaddys support of SOPA.

Namecheap is a good alternative

As an in house database developer I asked naively a month or two back what was so bad about Go-Daddy, assuming name registrars were all pretty much the same. Now I see how short sighted I was.

Why the hell does anyone even use GoDaddy any more?

Shouldn't have used GoDaddy. Anyone with a clue moved their domains off years ago.

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