[governance] A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Oh, I am not about to censor discussion of the issues at all.  

 

It is an interesting discussion - doing business, or not, with Iran, Cuba
and some other nations proscribed by the USG versus this case here, which
affects parties from totally unrelated nations that happen to host their
domain in the USA, with a US based registrar.

 

There are also previous cases like wikileaks.org recently, and well before
that, Indymedia some years back.  So this is not a very new issue as such.
It is a known issue, and one that would probably persist even after the ITU,
or the IGF, or the MAG, or whichever other new three letter organization
ends up running the show .. because of a simple principle, sovereignity of a
country.  

 

What you had was DoC contacting a US business (a registrar based in the USA)
and telling them about this issue, demanding a takedown.   OK, so some
bureaucrat didn't apply his mind very much to this case.  Point granted
here. But that was a US bureaucrat sending a notice to a US based company.

 

Addressing this first depends on the amount of spine that the registrar
actually has.  And then needs to be addressed by this guy suing the
registrar + USG for this unintended extra territorial application of US law
(unless he sold a US citizen a vacation in cuba or something, but even then,
extra territorial).

 

This at least can (and should) be challenged in court, as this entity is
arguably not doing business in a location that should be affected by
prohibitions on doing business with cuba.

 

 

From: KovenRonald at aol.com [mailto:KovenRonald at aol.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2008 9:39 PM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: Re: [governance] A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

 

Dear Suresh --

Oh, dear, that comment does sound in and of itself like attempted
censorship.

The NYTimes article was interesting, news to me, and demonstrated (contrary
to what I had thought) that the USG has used its I'net oversight powers for
a form of censorship. I thought it was a perfectly valid piece of info to
put on the list, and certainly more interesting than a lot of the personal
backbiting that sometimes makes me want the list to just go away somewhere
else.

Best regards, Rony Koven


**************
It's Tax Time! Get tips, forms, and advice on AOL Money & Finance.
(http://money.aol.com/tax?NCID=aolprf00030000000001)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20080305/474c4426/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance