Scenario: A Swiss bank’s Cayman Islands branch has issues with content published by the website wikileaks.org. They take the issue to an American court. As the individuals behind the Wikileaks site are not American citizens and are not presently in the USA, nor is the servers located in USA, the court has no direct jurisdiction over the matter. Instead they order a third party, a compliant domain registrar, to purge the site from DNS records.
Let me come up with a simile: This is equivalent to a Swedish court deciding that because an American paper publishes something that a Norwegian company doesn’t like, it orders a Swedish postal company to redirect all mail going to the address of that American paper to be redirected to a storage box. And so all postal companies globally now redirects all mail that formerly went to that American address to this storage box.
That simile is weak not because it’s quite ridiculous, but because it’s way narrower than the actual issue – it only affects mail to the American paper, when the real issue is more analogous to replacing the building in which that paper is printed with an empty warehouse.
Wikileaks’s main server is in Sweden (abundantly mirrored elsewhere), individuals involved are non-Americans outside of the USA. This is clearly not a case covered by American jurisdiction. Still, an American court is able to pressure an American company into purging the address of this organisation from the DNS system, which has global effects. Thereby suppressing Swedish freedom of expression.
I don’t like it. Not one bit. The DNS system should not be susceptible to attacks from within one nation on entities outside of that nation’s borders. At least, something should prevent court decisions made in any single nation from having global effects. The internet is not owned by the USA, and American courts should not have jurisdiction over it.
Also see Global Integrity Commons: Internet Censorship: A Comparative Study
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5 Responses to “USA suppressing foreign freedom of expression?”
February 20th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
I ‘knew’ that the DNS system was USA based, but before this article I didn’t care. Now I have visions of terrible things happening; say the USA bans alcohol, then all sites that promote it ‘must’ be blocked because they are un-constitutional.
But having limned the problem, how do you propose we solve it?
February 28th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
And how do we protect ourselves from such censorship?
Purchase DNS hosting outside of the USA? Or do we need to avoid the .com, .org, .net top-level domain names altogether?
February 29th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
What was on the site that was so objectionable? I can’t access it now(probably because I’m in the USA :P).
February 12th, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Very informative post. I’ve found your blog via Bing and I’m really happy about the information you provide in your posts. Btw your blogs layout is really messed up on the Kmelon browser. Would be cool if you could fix that. Anyhow keep up the great work!
February 12th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Theo, thanks for the kind words. I just checked in Kmelon, but the site looks they way it does in other browsers. I know there are many things in general that need fixing about the site (not browser specific) – but can you be more specific about what you see wrong? Thanks much.
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