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bryanlarsen
I'm getting a database error so I can't see the actual article, but I disagree. One case is enough to prove that it can be done, and it may possibly happen again. Even if this gets successfully challenged, in the interim all .COM registrations are potentially at risk.
mike-cardwell
I regret using .com for my personal domain now. I'd like to change it, but I haven't decided which TLD to use yet. thepiratebay changed to "se", to I'm guessing Sweden has a trustworthy TLD.

It's going to be a pain as well, there are thousands of links, so I'll need to keep the .com domain if only for redirects.

neilkelty
Are you going to start hosting torrents on your personal domain? Just don't break the law. It's really that simple.

I understand the "censorship/free speech" deal. But I can't really defend these guys, they were blatantly breaking the law. Like, there wasn't a gray area - they just jumped right over the line.

To make this a "true argument" we'd need the US to take down a domain that interferes with free speech.

gergles
Hypothetically, I'm gay. If I have sex with a man, I'm "breaking the law" in tens of Islamist countries. Are you proposing that they should be allowed to extradite me for breaking their law?

Because, that's really what's happening here. Bodog is a non-American company, operating outside of America, with assets that aren't in America. Please elucidate on how exactly you think they are subject to American law before you give a smug "well, don't break the law then" response.

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joering2
If you had sex in one of those Islamist countries, then yes of course. Look what Polanski did in 80s -- he ran away to Europe where laws are different not to face persecution. But he did have sex with underage on the American soil, hence it was in US interest to persecute. Had she gone to Europe and had underage sex with Polanski and came back to States and filed rape charges, that would be entire different story.

In Bodog case one could only wonder how much traffic they were getting from US. At some point, perhaps if they knew whats coming, they could ban US traffic or put notices all around their web that "there may be some laws in your country banning you from purchasing out products" etc.

motoford
I really hope you meant to type "prosecute" instead of what you actually put, "persecute".
joering2
thanks for pointing, cant fixed now..
mariuolo
Suppose he had been camming with some guy living there. Should he be liable to extradition (and possibly beheading) to such country?
mike-cardwell
I do not live in the USA. The laws which you're referring to, do not apply to me. They can be used to take my domain though. That's where the concern is.
ThaddeusQuay2
DotSE is not at all trustworthy. Use DotTEL. Host nothing at MC.com, but rather have it redirect to MC.tel, and populate MC.tel with a link to the main page of your content, as well as links to mirrors of that content.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel

mike-cardwell
What you can do with .tel domains seems to be extremely limited.

I am interested to know why you think .se is not trustworthy?

ThaddeusQuay2
DotTEL is nice because all of your information is stored in DNS, and so the webpage itself is created dynamically from DNS. Also, it can't go down due to a DOS attack. Well, actually, it can, but then all DotTELs would be down, and so the burden of rectifying it would be on the registrar, rather than on you. Given that such a problem would be treated as an emergency, by them, the response will likely be swift. However, their response might include deleting your domain, but that could happen with any registrar, for other reasons. Anyway, there are other nice things about DotTEL, and I strongly suggest that it warrants investigation, for practical use, by anyone who is already using DotCOM.

I understand why TPB moved away from DotCOM, but I don't understand why they moved to DotSE. However, I do know that they were put on trial for breaking Swedish copyright law. The trial resulted in fines and jail time, with their Supreme Court refusing to hear the appeal just this month. While the trial was happening, I read reports of many strange legal things going on in court, and I read opinions about this being due to inordinate influence of the industry on the Swedish government. Regardless of the veracity of those reports and opinions, it seems obvious that you wouldn't want to use the domain of a country where you have already been in serious legal trouble, and lost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay#Legal_issues

EDIT: DotTEL is not at all limited, as long as you can transition to the mindset of decoupling your content from its address.

EDIT: DotTEL answers pretty much all of the concerns regarding speed, in this other HN thread, from today.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3648956

onemoreact
It's called precedent, look it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent

monochromatic
So where's the appeals court opinion sanctioning this type of thing? Without something like that, I don't see much precedential value.
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AshleysBrain
Could this set a precedent in the SOPA vein of things?
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mbowcock
This seems to be the same issue as megaupload. A company outside the US, marketing a service that's illegal in the US to US citizens. Money paid for the service is then moved overseas. (I understand there may have been users in other countries, like megaupload)

While not something I necessarily agree with - I don't think this particular move indicates all .COMs are now threatened.

MatthewPhillips
It indicates that anyone using a .COM domain must either: 1) Not do business with American customers. or 2) Be aware of every U.S. law to avoid allowing their American customers from breaking one of them.
mbowcock
But that is already an issue - whether or not you have a .com domain name. The domain name is just an asset and the government routinely seizes assets when filing criminal charges.
MatthewPhillips
They can only seize assets that they have dominion over. Which now, apparently, includes .COM domains.
mbowcock
The US government has always had dominion over .coms (and .nets). Verisign manages .com's through a contract with the US Department of Commerce. That's where they get there authority.
regularfry
Yes, but they've only recently bothered or got the gumption to enforce it.
pbhjpbhj
If .com domains weren't considered to be USA based though then a USA citizen would be the one that was being charged for breaking the law wouldn't they?

Flip it around. Suppose someone is selling online under a Somali .so domain rather than a .com; the law should operate in the same way as long as the web servers themselves aren't located in USA.

Isn't it the assumption that any transaction with a .com is essentially under the purview of USA law that is at issue?

This just emphasises the need for .com to be considered neutral territory. It's only a redirection mechanism - USA can have and apply their laws to .co.us and of course any server that is based in USA.

mbowcock
It's not transactions with the .com that's at issue. It's the fact that a company operating a business the government considers illegal is making money in the US and moving it overseas.

It's all about the money. Not .COMs.

Running a gambling site on an .so domain and hosting the servers overseas while profiting in the US will still get you indicted. The government might not have the authority to shut off your internet presence but I'm sure they could turn off finances in the US. And certainly make travel to certain countries an issue.

regularfry
.co.us is Colorado. .com.us?
pbhjpbhj
Yes, .com.us. Sorry, we use .co.[ccTLD] here.
Symmetry
They routinely seize assets without filing criminal charges as well.
majorlazer
Your second point makes it seem like there are so many laws that you have to be aware of to avoid getting your domain seized by the US. These latest busts have been for gambling and pirating, I bet the owners knew this was coming sooner or later.
drostie
Your second point makes it seem like there are so many laws that you have to be aware of to avoid getting your domain seized by the US.

Well yes, but in principle that's exactly right. Really think about this: in principle you need to know the entire legal code of the US and all of the ways that someone in the US might use your site to try to break that legal code, before you know whether you're safe. If you start operating the next version of CraigsList and people in the US start using it to sell fish which were caught in violation of U.S. law, it doesn't matter whether you realized it was happening at the time, whether those fish are legal in your country, or any such thing; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could get a prosecutor to convince a judge to issue a takedown warrant for your domain.

What's that, you say? You just run a tasks-and-dates management web app? You'll ban users from the U.S. from logging in? That's not necessarily going to help. If your service gets used by some radical Muslims in some country that the U.S. happens to be bombing, they might take you down. Given the tempting targets, I guess you'd best be banning Iran from logging in, just in case the elite there find your app useful.

Bottom line is, in this case it's quite possible that the gambling enterprise that they were running was perfectly legal in their home country and happened to be illegal in one state in the U.S. -- and people in the U.S. were using it for its intended purpose illegally. So in the bigger picture, if you really think about it, the fact that you're not catching the US government's attention yet is no defense: in principle you need to know all of the things which are illegal in the U.S., and how users both inside and outside of the U.S. might use your site to do those things. Otherwise, you'd better move off of .com, to some domains run by a government which doesn't routinely steal them.

speleding
A little anecdote to support your story: Just this morning a US citizen using my appointment scheduling web service (based in Europe) got into trouble for selling English lessons to Iranian students (it wasn't intentional he sells English lessons to anyone, PayPal flagged the money transfers).

I spend a good part of this morning figuring out how to keep Iranians off of the scheduling calendar. I believe that world peace would be much better served with more Iranians learning English but I really do not want my business to get in trouble with the US over it. Sad really.

lhnn
“Sports betting is illegal in Maryland, and federal law prohibits bookmakers from flouting that law simply because they are located outside the country," DHS said.

LOL what? "You can't flout the law just because you're outside the jurisdiciton of the law".

---

Also, the crux of the article is that a .COM domain registered an operated by Canadian entities was "taken over" by Verisign at the behest of DHS. Verisign added NS records at the root to redirect the affected domain to a takedown page.

raganwald
Are they saying that an English company (where sports betting is legal) taking bets from English punters is running afoul of Maryland law? I doubt it. What they are saying is that doing business with American citizens is subject to American laws.

EDIT: An interesting read... http://www.vegassportsmasters.com/?q=article/feds-arrest-eng...

MatthewPhillips
Which is also ridiculous. American citizens are subject to American laws; the person making the bet.
pbhjpbhj
>Are they saying that an English company (where sports betting is legal) taking bets from English punters is running afoul of Maryland law? //

Didn't Britain just extradite (or at least accede to an extradition 'request') a young man to the US for operating a service providing media links (but apparently no copyright material) - where it's likely that his actions were wholly legal under English law and he never set foot outside of the country ...

Seems like USA has their way regardless of other peoples democracy.

--

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9013408/Student...

raganwald
Ow, you touched a sore spot, we Canadians did exactly the same thing by extraditing a fellow who was selling grass seeds by mail to US citizens. Strangely (sarcasm intended), we have refused such requests for the operators of online pharmacies, who employ a lot of people and generate sales for some big and influential Pharma companies in Canada.
cperciva
It's not strange at all: Canada extradites people if the actions they are accused of are crimes in Canada.

Drug trafficking, for all that it generally isn't enforced in the case of marijuana, is illegal in Canada; so a Canadian accused of trafficking drugs into the US was extradited. Selling prescription medications to patients with proper prescriptions is legal in Canada.

bryanlarsen
But selling marijuana seeds is not (was not?) illegal in Canada.
cperciva
Viable marijuana seeds are included in Schedule II of the CDSA. The law isn't enforced, but it's still there.
redthrowaway
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Drugs_and_Substances...

It appears that, while non-viable seeds are explicitly legal, there does not appear to be any prohibition against viable seeds, unless they are considered a marijuana "preparation". I suspect there's some case law floating around where a court has decided whether or not cannabis seeds are considered a marijuana preparation.

Edit: Erowid is somewhat helpful in this regard, although the linked article is broken:

http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_law.shtml

cperciva
I am not a lawyer, but I would be very surprised if Canadian courts didn't interpret that text in accordance with the general principle that all words have meaning -- i.e., explicitly stating that non-viable seeds are legal implies that the intention was that viable seeds are not legal.
nkassis
I was under the impression that the law prohibited viable seeds but due to a loophole (you can't be certain a seed is viable or not) they couldn't stop people with any seed. I might be remembering this all wrong.
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DanBC
But why aren't they going after the Americans who are breaking American law, rather than the non-Americans who are just doing business?

But see also this (someone else posted it on HN, but I can't remember who or where):

(http://cphpost.dk/news/international/us-snubs-out-legal-ciga...)

marshray
They could easily go after Americans, but then they'd having things like due process and trials by jury to worry about.

Instead, DHS would rather set precedent that a judge's signature in Maryland (a suburb of Washington DC) is all that is necessary to seize .com/org/net domains anywhere in the world. It's a fait accomplit against a foreign company, they're less likely to fight back, and the precedent extends their authority.

literalusername
Normally, in cases like this, the law prohibits businesses from offering gambling services. In that case, no Americans would have broken any law.

However, a quick google search strongly implies that sports betting is in fact legal in Maryland. http://www.legalgambling.net/is-sports-betting-legal-in/mary...

Something is amiss.

Edit: While the Rosenstein quote erroneously states that "Sports betting is illegal in Maryland", it seems more likely that this was actually a breach of the 1961 Federal Wire Act, which banned sports betting over the wire. If Bodog allowed bets to cross state lines, then they're involved in interstate commerce, so the Wire Act applies.

snowwrestler
Perhaps my understanding is wrong, but I thought Verisign is the only registrar and operator for .com domains--other registrars like GoDaddy or this Canadian company simply resell Verisign registrations, which they get at a wholesale price.
tomp
It is wrong. There are many registrars, but Verisign is the registry (i.e. where the records are stored).
Shivetya
Technology out grew the nation state model. Look at the long arm of the IRS and how the US uses pressure on other countries to comply with it.

The nation states are going to do their best to reign the freedom technology provides back in.

shingen
What they meant to say is: we don't believe anyone on earth is outside our jurisdiction.
JsonCulverhouse
Isn't this standard "Long arm jurisdiction"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_arm_jurisdiction
pygy_
As described in the Wikipedia article, the arm doesn't get past the US border, only across states jurisdictions.
freejack
Verisign added NS records to the .com zone servers, not to the root. The root has very little in it, basically just pointers to the TLD zone servers...
gbaygon
I have a doubt, if megaupload would have been megaupload.hk instead of .com, could the fbi have acted the same way?
nextparadigms
I think so, because they also claimed Megaupload had some servers in US. But their case would've probably been weaker then. I think this power to take down .com, .net .org domains comes mostly from the Pro IP Act from 2008 that passed right before our noses, just like SOPA almost did. If we want DHS to stop doing this, we'll need to get the Pro IP Act repealed.
guan
How long before they pull something from the root zone using the same reasoning?
astrodust
You would have to pull a whole TLD if you're removing something from the root zone.
olefoo
Given that the floodgates on new TLDs are opening, it seems quite possible that a TLD operator could run afoul of the law and put thousands if not millions of domains at risk.
regularfry
You just know someone's going to get .torrent, and then all hell will break loose...
snowwrestler
Aren't there two elements to the question of jurisdiction here? The fact that .com is managed by Verisign is one (on which this article focuses), but the other is that Bodog was executing financial transactions with residents of Maryland. Thus, by doing business in the state, they expose themselves to that state's jurisdiction.

The big question is whether U.S. jurisdiction can extend beyond U.S. based border based solely upon the fact that Verisign is located in the U.S. For instance, if a Canadian set up a .com gambling site, but only did business with other Canadians, could MD prosecute the site owner based on MD state laws against online gambling? I would guess no. But I'm not a lawyer.

calloc
So if I have a European company that sells widgets online, and I ship to the United States I now have to comply with US laws at my expense?
aidenn0
Yes, with at least these consequences:

1) Any warehouse you have in the US that is part of your widget operation can be seized (this is the equivalent of the .com being taken over)

2) The US can request extradition of you and it is up to your countries courts to decide if they will comply

calloc
Except I don't have a warehouse in the United States. All I have is widgets located in Europe, I put them in a box and I ship them using parcel post to anyone anywhere in the world.

Yet you are saying that I am now beholden to US law because I interacted with a customer located in the United States ...

larrys
The question is not whether you have to comply so much as what they can do. If you are selling a physical product it has to get into the US somehow (unless you drop it like a drug dealer by airplane of course). So you are either using the postal service, UPS, Fedex etc or it's coming in at a port or some other method. One way or another, separate from a domain name, there is a way for the government to stop that product from being sold here (of course you can alternate your delivery methods and obscure who you are but that's another story).

I regularly get letters from overseas companies offering to put my trademarks into "International Trademark Registries". They charge $1000's of dollars hoping that someone's bookeeper will be fooled and pay. They very very clearly violate US laws in many ways. Yet they still keep coming. The government doesn't go to the trouble of attempting to shut them down (they could block wire transfers or credit card payments etc but the don't). It's simply not important enough to them.

This idea that just because something can happen it will is ridiculous.

It's also breaking the law to go 56 mph in a 55 mph zone. But how many people have received tickets for doing that?

calloc
Sure, they can hold my shipments and destroy them, and I'd have to refund my customers money, but that wouldn't mean they could bring a lawsuit against my company because I was shipping something completely legal in my country to a country where it was not legal (if I had known, off course it wouldn't matter, but how can I be required to read up on US law to run my business).
sethg
Well, in theory, this is true for any country. If you ship widgets to a customer in Madagascar and those widgets violate some obscure Malagasy law you never heard of, the Malagasy authorities could prosecute you. But if you didn’t have any assets or employees in Madagascar and never planned to travel there, and if there was no law or treaty in your home country that let them extradite you or attach your home assets, then you could just put their warrant in the trash.
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joejohnson
What is the safest ccTLD be for businesses to register under? .se?
ihsw
Probably .info, it's not managed by any national government.
barredo
But is seen as a lesser domain by Google if SEO tales are true.
kamjam
I missed the whole thing where .com was managed by the US, i thought that's why the .us domain was invented... i don't think anyone outside the US associates a .com meaning US based.

Regardless, stupid law, Team America strikes again!

drostie
The company which manages .com is headquartered in the US. This is also true for .org and .net and .us and .gov.

Under US law it is now possible for the US to seize any of these domain names -- and it will continue until the international organization in charge of this system (ICANN) says "oh, that's retarded, we're changing the system so that the US doesn't host .com and .org domains."

We had to fight against two acts proposed in the US which would have made it possible for the US to build a sort of DNS firewall to deny access to other domains from users working within the US -- our own rough draft of the Chinese firewall, if you like. (That was SOPA and PIPA.) But this other right was granted earlier than that, and is now being used to chilling effect.

kamjam
Wow, thanks, I didn't know that. Why this stuff isn't decentralised is crazy, but at this point I guess there is a lot of vested interest to keep it that way.

EDIT: Just read about BitCoin! Sounding better and better now!

kamjam
What about .org, piratebay uses that right?
icebraining
Not anymore, they use .se now.

EDIT: This is wrong, see peteri's post.

.org is essentially the same as .com, owned by the US government and managed by Verisign.

peteri
.org is operated by PIR (actually afilias in dublin according to wikipedia) not sure exactly how much leverage the US has over it currently.
un1xl0ser
I imagine that corporate interests (records, movies) in the US and EU could collude to get a pirate site taken down if it had a .org, it would just be another tree to fall.

So far the US has not publicly tried to drop wikileaks.org, forcing WikiLeaks migrate to a TLD that is clearly outside US reach. Maybe they wouldn't want the bad press.

I'm wondering what is possible if I simply have a relationship with a reseller in the US (e.g. the one with the superbowl ads, or eNom), but my TLD registrar is outside of reach. I assume they could make the reseller drop the contract, or terminate it.

joejohnson
No, you're right. Thepiratebay.org redirects to thepiratebay.se
corford
I'd say .is is probably the safest (just a shame they're not cheap but on the other hand there are still lots of good names available as a consequence).
sireat
I wonder why you say .is is safest?

They are not very expensive ($35 seems about right for a domain name) I considered a domain there, but was not sure if I needed to be a resident of Iceland.

I like how Iceland has been spunky enough and stood up to a lot of international pressure at times (fish wars with UK, granting citizenship to Bobby Fischer who US really did not like, but otherwise was quite harmless, the way Iceland has handled banking crisis).

What I am wondering is what gives Iceland this power to say NO to big powers?

It would seem like majors could just ostracize it just like most countries that ran afoul of bigger countries. Is it because going against Iceland would anger Scandinavian countries?

corford
I say it because of things like http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/iceland_passes_proposal...

There are other reasons as well such as the way Iceland decided to ignore the IMF and default rather than go the Irish or Portuguese route when their economy blew up during the credit crunch.

Check out www.1984.is - I have a couple of .is domains registered through them and would consider their VPS service if I had something controversial to host.

Edit: forget to mention you don't need to be an Icelandic resident - registration is open to all.

im_dario
Maybe we can take some .is domains too. IMMI is going to be great.

Edit: I forgot to add that probably the safest TLD is from countries on their own and not being affected by Team America. Spain is not an option, we got our own SOPA by official pressures...

Edit 2: Oh, what about Switzerland? .ch anyone?

zokier
.eu is managed by multinational organization, so any single government has limited power
veyron
Title of the article is

    Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign Registrar on behalf of US Authorities.
heyitsnick
The domain seizure is nothing out of the ordinary. At least a dozen have been seized over the last 12 months, including those during the indictments of Black Friday (nb pokerstars.com, fulltiltpoker.com have been handed black) and Blue Monday (at least 10 domains still under seizure including truepoker.com).

The domain itself (bodog.com) was unused. The operation continues under bovada.lv (for US) and bodog.eu/co.uk for European custom.

Nearly all US-facing gambling operations have been moved to non-dotcom domains (dot.eu, dot.co.uk and dot.ag - for Antigua and Bermuda - the most common) for this very reason.

To read more from an industry perspective [full disclosure, i am co-editor of this site]: http://pokerfuse.com/news/law-and-regulation/undercover-inve...

The domain seizure itself was of interest only as it showed the DOJ/DHS have a continued interest in trying to take down what it sees as illegal online gambling operators; that they can order a dot-com domain name seizure is par-for-the-course these days.

cmatthias
If you read the article, you will discover that the author asserts that this situation is different, because it's the first time that a .com domain registered through a foreign registrar has been subject to seizure by US authorities. I don't know enough about the history of domain seizures to know whether this is true or not, but if so, it definitely represents an increased level of enforcement by US authorities -- if I owned a company operated and registered outside the US, I'd now think twice about using a .com name as my primary address.
larrys
"if I owned a company operated and registered outside the US, I'd now think twice about using a .com name as my primary address."

Why? Is that just on principle? Or do you see this behavior by the government as rising to the level of the US taking down sites that flout or even break the law in a de minimis way?

Keep in mind that to do what they did there is a level of case preparation required to get the proper signoffs to make this happen.

I think if someone is doing something illegal they have something to worry about, sure. But for 99.9% of the web sites out there why is this a cause for worry?

Edit (since I can't reply to below):

"the "convenience factor" of owning a .com no longer outweighs the potential risk"

The reason to own a .com is not convenience. It's ubiquity at least in the US. Speaking as someone in the business who deals with customers of registration domains all the time (and also with people buying valuable domains) at this time using a non .com domain is a non-starter for the majority of people.

cmatthias
"Why? Is that just on principle? Or do you see this behavior by the government as rising to the level of the US taking down sites that flout or even break the law in a de minimis way?"

I think it's a combination of several factors. One is definitely principle. The other major reason is that if I'm running a business from outside the US, and do not deal with US customers or business partners, why should I waste my time figuring out whether what I'm doing is contrary to some law in one US state, just to ensure that the US doesn't steal my domain from me?

Especially in some industries, there are vastly different notions of what is considered appropriate in the US vs. Europe (see the sports betting example). My opinion is that based on cases such as this, the "convenience factor" of owning a .com no longer outweighs the potential risk of losing the domain on the whim of the US government.

drucken
Exactly.

This can only be a boon for the .EU domain, ccTLDs and all their registers, especially those which allow second-level domain names like .de.

There is simply too much uncertainty with using American-hosted domains already and it is increasing every week.

litek
I think the cause for concern is the mere possibility that you can be drawn in to a legal battle in a foreign country over your domain, without even operating in it.
Vivtek
They weren't doing anything illegal - where they were. Do you think you should be punished for doing something that's illegal anywhere in the world?
unavoidable
The legal argument to this is that they were doing business with people in a jurisdiction where it was illegal (i.e. certain forms of betting in the US). Because they had business transactions in this jurisdiction, they have broken the laws there and can be tried in those courts.
Vivtek
I eagerly await all the Sharia law trials of anyone who's posted a bit.ly link to a pornographic picture, then.

And they're not being tried in those courts. Their domain has simply been seized because that's easier than winning in court.

ma2rten
You are missing the point. Libya can totally trail someone for hosting any porn site under Sharia law. It is completely irrelevant what the TLD is or were the servers are hosted. The only thing that is important is that it is accessible from within Libya. If you want to protect yourself from this you need to block out all Libyan IPs. At least this is the case for many laws in many jurisdictions, I obviously don't know anything the Libyan one. However, if the site is hosted under a Libyan TLD this gives them additional power to block the site. This is a very unfortunate situation for website owners around the world, but this is the way it is.
unavoidable
Don't know why everyone downvoted. I'm only stating the legal reality, not making a comment on whether that's "moral" or "right".
ubernostrum
Actually...

If you are in one country, and are clearly and unambiguously doing business with someone in another country -- with written agreements, money/goods/etc. transferring -- then it's simply not a new idea that you may end up subject in some way to the laws of that other country. It also isn't a particularly scary idea.

The idea that "on the internet" is some sort of magical extra-jurisdictional space is the new and scary idea.

foobarbazetc
It doesn't say anywhere they had business transactions in the jurisdiction. Thats the entire point.

Non-US site, non-US registrar, non-US accounts/transactions.

Still seized by DHS. Because it's illegal in the US. That means you can be put on trial in any country in the world if you break any laws, anywhere. That's what the article is getting at.

cmatthias
(HN makes you wait a few minutes before you can reply. That's why the reply link was missing.)

"The reason to own a .com is not convenience. It's ubiquity at least in the US."

I know. I was not talking about the US.

"at this time using a non .com domain is a non-starter for the majority of people."

I disagree. For anyone who is not in the US (which is the majority of people), having a non-.com domain is probably not a big deal.

ma2rten
It is if you are running an international business, I'd assume that OP meant convenience as in not having to register a domain for every possible country.
nextparadigms
I think all those situations are "out of the ordinary". This has only happened in the past couple of years. Not to mention that I don't think US should "own" the .com domain.
literalusername
> full disclosure, i am co-editor of this site

Awesome site. I tried subscribing to your newsletter, and the server responded:

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  CSRF verification failed. Request aborted.
  More information is available with DEBUG=True.
Edit: I wonder if the site's trying to detect CSRF with a cookie, which I rejected. I hope not, because that would mean I won't be subscribing to your newsletter.
heyitsnick
Woh sorry about that, I will check it out. I guess it's django's CSRF verification not working. Don't think it's cookie-based though so not sure what's going on.

The mailing list is run through mailchimp, you can sign up directly here:

http://eepurl.com/fsyQo

Thanks!

dpearce
It looks like all Bodog did is relaunch as Bovada.lv
heyitsnick
Bovada.lv has been active since November; but even before then it was operating all US activities from Bodog.eu. The dot-com domain name has been 'dormant' (i believe it redirected to one of the two).

The dot-com domain name seizure is symbolic and will hurt their SEO; it will have little effect on their business.

[but indicting 4 top-level execs and aggressively pursuing their payment processors, however, will certainly have an effect]

rayiner
The gambling charges are pre-internet jurisdictional law. By doing business with citizens of Maryland, you bring yourself within Maryland's jurisdiction, at least to the scope of that business. Domains have nothing to do with why Maryland can enforce its gambling laws against a Canadian company.

The internet-age wrinkle is that by virtue of ".com" domains being property located in the US, they can be seized pursuant to these charges. Jurisdiction over property is very specific to the locality where the property is located. Maryland couldn't, for example, seize the company's real estate assets in Canada pursuant to its criminal charges for violation of Maryland law. Since all ".com" domains are logically located in the United States, that becomes a pretty substantial piece of leverage the U.S. has over other countries.

schwit
Not just .com. US law applies to any TLD managed by a US registrar. An example is .tv which is managed by Verisign.
runevault
Considering .tv is the domain for another country I find this more than a little stupid. Not necessarily surprising, but stupid all the same.
tonfa
Do you have any examples of that? As far as I know while .com/.net/.org are under US jurisdiction, it isn't the case of other TLDs managed by Verisign.
overshard
Good to see that the .com tld will finally start to become a non-priority thanks to this. People/startups/companies in other countries will hopefully start to think twice before they purchase a .com domain name and consider using their own countries tld or a tld more appropriate to their website.
greedoshotlast
At least a warrant was filled. In the recent JotForms takedown no warrant was filled. It just disappeared off the face of the planet. That is mainly my argument: the US Secret Service or any government organization has no right to make sites, it JotForms's case a legitimate business, just disappear from the face of the planet without due process.
vlnul
Hypothetically, how difficult should be for civilians build root servers? After that what we need is to update the bind package right?
wmf
Yes, it's trivial to run your own root server. Convincing other people is the hard part.
JumpCrisscross
There is a difference between a Canadian company doing business with Canadians on a .com domain and a Canadian company doing business with Canadians and Americans in the United States.

The analogy for finance, my industry, would be a hedge fund registered in the Caymans either trading US securities or trading with Americans in the United States (it gets sketchy if an American citizen comes to Switzerland to do a transaction) not getting to ignore SEC rules just because they're "not based in the US".

I'd get concerned about jurisdictional over-reach if a Spanish company doing business primarily in Spain (where American customers aren't specifically marketed to but may be picked up indirectly) got DMCA'd :). Though at this point I'm starting to think any content-based company should have a non-US domain and server at the very least ready as a fall-back in case of regulatory lunacy on the order of SOPA/PIPA.

mcantelon
>The analogy for finance, my industry, would be a hedge fund registered in the Caymans either trading US securities or trading with Americans in the United States (it gets sketchy if an American citizen comes to Switzerland to do a transaction) not getting to ignore SEC rules just because they're "not based in the US".

That comparison doesn't seem to quite fit. If a company violated SEC rules it would have to be trading through a US exchange and would therefore have agreed to abide by US rules. In this case we have US users who are breaking the law by doing something illegal in their own country. They should be punished, not the foreign website.

JumpCrisscross
If a company violated SEC rules it would have to be trading through a US exchange

Not necessarily. If ABN AMRO markets Turkish bonds to US investors it will have placed itself under SEC jurisdiction just as much as Lehman Brothers marketing mini-bonds in Indonesia placed itself under Indonesian jurisdiction.

The US government has gone further with financial institutions. Take, for example, the Swiss banks helping Americans with tax evasion. Let's exclude those with US branches, e.g. UBS. Here you have American citizens travelling to Switzerland and opening accounts and the Swiss company is held responsible merely for doing business with an American.

I'm not making specific arguments on whether this is jurisdictional over-reach, but characterising the .com seizure in the OP an un-precedented move by Luddite judges isn't fair.

lukejduncan
Even if the company did make attempts to verify the citizenship of it's users, what opportunity would it have had to argue its case?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
DanBC
I'm a bit confused by this thread. Can someone check this?

i) Doing trade with someone who is located in America means you have to obey those American laws? This seems reasonable, unless you've taken measure to exclude Americans ("Click here to agree that you're not in US" and using filters etc) and you're still getting done.

ii) It doesn't matter what domain name you use. But if you use a .com (and some others) the US can seize the domain names.

iii) Depending what country you are in the US may ask for an extradition because you broke an American law; even if what you did was legal in your country. Depending what country you're in (UK) that extradition request may be granted.

unavoidable
i) and iii) are pretty well established in American jurisprudence. ii) is less so and is the reason for the uproar. The article is making the proposition that ii) is true, but I don't think that's actually correct. On the facts of this case i) and iii) are sufficient to lay charges here, but the indictment is written to look like ii) is true.

EDIT: I want to add that there is not very clear case law on the .com issue - that was what SOPA was in part designed to do, make a statutory provision to allow assertion of jurisdiction. I think it's important to keep in mind that the filing of the indictment is not a judicial ruling and is not necessarily "the law of the land". The quotes the article used were true, but taken out of context. They are referring to funds being transferred outside of US but related to business done cross-border.

elb0w
Next, U.S. Government declares anyone buying a non us domain (.com, .net, org, .biz and maybe .info) will be considered a terrorist.
redthrowaway
>Of course, the replacement of ICANN will never happen

What's the reasoning behind this? I agree that we will likely not see a new body in charge of that which ICANN currently does, but there's no reason why a parallel system couldn't arise should DC go overboard with its malfeasant retardation.

ICANN has inertia, but if it continues to fail to protect the Internet, something else will pop up.

marshray
The funny thing here is that all of this big-money big-government international strategic arm twisting is over DNS settings, something users can change as easily as changing two numbers.

If things get bad enough, users will simply point their resolvers to some alternate root. Trying to block DNS requests to alternate resolvers is a laughable proposition from a technical perspective.

nitrogen
If things get bad enough, users will simply point their resolvers to some alternate root. Trying to block DNS requests to alternate resolvers is a laughable proposition from a technical perspective.

ISPs can block outbound port 53 like they block port 25, or use DPI to detect DNS packets headed out of the ISP network. The only way around that is universal encryption, which the ISPs can slow down but not stop by blocking any high-entropy packets.