NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad

NNSquad Home Page

NNSquad Mailing List Information

 


[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[ NNSquad ] DNS Shutdown Orders vs. Free Speech


[ From IP ]

------- Forwarded Message

From: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
To: "ip" <ip@v2.listbox.com>
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2008 03:30:01 -0800
Subject: [IP] A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

________________________________________
From: Tom Cross [tom@memestreams.net]
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 8:08 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

For IP:

Should US trade embargoes apply to DNS registrars, where the activity
being prohibited is primarily speech?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/us/04bar.html

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: March 4, 2008
Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he
sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including
Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks
to the United States government...

It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall's Web sites had been put on
a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American
domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall
said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury
Department; the company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned
that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.

Either way, there is no dispute that eNom shut down Mr. Marshall's
sites without notifying him and has refused to release the domain
names to him....

Susan Crawford, a visiting law professor at Yale and a leading
authority on Internet law, said the fact that many large domain name
registrars are based in the United States gives the Treasury's Office
of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, control "over a great deal of
speech" none of which may be actually hosted in the U.S., about the
U.S. or conflicting with any U.S. rights.

"OFAC apparently has the power to order that this speech disappear,"
Professor Crawford said...

-------------------------------------------
Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com

------------------------------