LowEndTalk community member @treesmokah (great nick) shared news of a terrifying development:
ICANN, the organization that regulates global domain name policy, and Verisign, the abusive monopolist that operates the .COM and .NET top-level domains, have quietly proposed enormous changes to global domain name policy in their recently published “Proposed Renewal of the Registry Agreement for .NET”, which is now open for public comment.
Either by design, or unintentionally, they’ve proposed allowing any government in the world to cancel, redirect, or transfer to their control applicable domain names! This is an outrageous and dangerous proposal that must be stopped. While this proposal is currently only for .NET domain names, presumably they would want to also apply it to other extensions like .COM as those contracts come up for renewal.
Um, wait…what?!?
Indeed, the new proposal says:
Verisign reserves the right to deny, cancel, redirect, or transfer any registration or transaction, or place any domain names on registry lock, hold or similar status, as it deems necessary, in its unlimited and sole discretion…to ensure compliance with applicable law, government rules or regulations, or pursuant to any legal order or subpoena of any government, administrative, or government authority, or court of competent jurisdiction…
Terrifying.
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WOW. Disturbing news to say the least. I see a huge opening for abuse if the “monopolist commies” change the rules.
Somebody didn’t think this through. The idea was probably to quickly allow seizing of domains used for scamming, ransomware, terrorist, and other illegal activities. Typical political ideas that sound good on the surface. But nobody investigated what this could actually mean without any safeguards in place. Sigh.