News

U.S. Seizes Canadian-Owned and Registered Domain Name

The EasyDNS blog has an excellent – albeit scary – post on the U.S. government seizure of bodog.com, the Canadian-owned online gambling site. The domain was seized by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security despite the fact that it was Canadian registered. The only U.S. connection is that the dot-com registry is located in the U.S. The move sends a message that all dot-com, dot-net, and dot-org domains are ultimately subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

8 Comments

  1. Money
    Gambling is big, easily-made money. A cash siphon like this is going to be kept within American borders. American officials didn’t get their Great Firewall, so have been forced to resort to plan B.

    This, to me, is yet another indication that Canada needs sovereign control of its internet infrastructure. I certainly appreciate how far the Americans have taken things, but clearly, our cultural/societal/economic differences are beginning to strain circumstance. I think we need to stand on our own two feet for a while.

    I don’t suppose anyone knows a Canadian group looking for funding to start & maintain independent DNS/authentication/etc servers? Seems like something Theo de Raadt might have taken on, but his plate looks pretty full, already. Maybe a university, Waterloo or some other with a focus on math?

  2. This is something CIRA needs to step into.

  3. Daniel Friesen says:

    @Danux the problem is not site dns being in the US. We already have nameservers in Canada that one can use. The problem is that the dns servers for the com, org, etc… top level domains that define the NS records that dictate what nameservers are used to define the dns records for a domain is controlled by companies located in the US. The ONLY way around that is to use a .ca domain name where the registry is in Canada.

    Now there’s something even more horrifying than that. Every IP in North America is handed out by ARIN. And ARIN is located in the US. So technically every Canadian IP address could be taken over.

  4. Not a legal expert by any means, so my questions may seem too simplistic, but none the less, here they are. Canada is a member of ARIN. Is there anything stopping Canada from withdrawing from ARIN and starting, for example, CRIN, thereby taking access to Canadian IP addresses away from the US? Assuming that this is not possible, as a sovereign nation, why do we not have the right to deny access to information regarding Canadian IP addresses? Lastly, am I correct when I assume that a demand from the Canadian Government for IP address information to ARIN regarding a US IP address will not automatically be granted? If so we have granted the US government control of Canadian sites and need to stand up and stop sitting on our brains.

  5. Something not frequently pointed out…
    … is that ICANN, the ultimate arbiter of the Internet’s TLD, is also a US corporation. You are not safe hiding under .ca … both the Internet root domain and ARIN IP address delegations are under the thumb of the US Government.

  6. It balences out
    On one hand it’s a bit scary the way the USis extending its legal reach. However, on the other hand i *really* dislike Calvin Ayre so I’m all for anything that that causes him to lose all his money and endure suffering.

  7. So umm can we shut down Ebay since I know people from Canada that used Ebay to buy tazers/stun guns. Yeh sometimes they get confiscated at customs but at times they go through. Since Tasers are illegal in Canada, E-bay and those business websites should be taken over by the RCMP and shut down.

    THEN watch the US have a hissy fit how the internet should be free and Canadian citizen should be punished for ordering illegal items.

  8. A Canadian company registered in a US domain. How often do a I see comments that a foreign company dealing with Canadians needs to follow Canadian rules?

    End user, I do agree with you, but are Tasers available on the EBay Canadian site? I don’t know.