[Chapter-delegates] English Wikipedia going dark tomorrow!

[Christian de Larrinaga]

Narelle / Fred

Since 2010 the US is increasingly becoming a source for instability in the Internet's management / governance sphere. 

Without SOPA/PIPA on any statute books we have a case in the UK where a teenage blogger Richard O'Dwyer (now 23) is being pursued by the US for extradition for setting up links to content that the US agencies declares is illegal but where no offence or prospect of a charge in the UK seems possible or likely.  Operating from his bedroom I gather he had no connection, assets, nor customers in the USA. He was not running a download service as I understand it. So it appears that the act of linking alone is an extraditable criminal offence in the US today. At least if you are a Brit. 

It should be noted that the UK has the Digital Economy Act in place already but is not using it in this case. This is a US driven prosecution. 

The timeline is instructive. He first had his domain tvshack.net suspended by the US agency ICE in 2010. No court hearing was held, no warning given. This action was justified because .net is managed in the US. He later had tvshack.cc suspended by ICE as well. This was justified as Verisign a US entity is the outsourced registry operator of .cc.  In neither case was suspension made due to an infringement in the registrants conduct with the actual registration. 

The action was justified on the basis that the activities and content of the website fell under US jurisdiction due to the jurisdiction of the top level domain registry operator. The same rationale has been used for domains held by non US entities under several gTLD's, including .org, .net, .com. 

.cc is the ccTLD of the Cocos Islands an Australian dependency since the mid 1950's. 

Narelle do you know if the Australian / Cocos Island authorities have any input or say so over this suspension? It is a substantial escalation to have the US seize ccTLD domains delegated to a non US jurisdiction even if the registration services are outsourced to a US entity to manage. 

There is one other nastiness in SOPA and PIPA story which is the perceived acceptability of their proponents in targeting "foreign" websites. It is an interesting idea that my use of any number of services involves several instances of "websites" to view and manage these services. It also means I have limited clue as to the location or flow of my data around the world. Yet the US legislators believe they can distinguish between such content as it flows in and out of the US and feel it acceptable to filter or suspend URIs or potentially other identifiers on that basis. I can see my address book going into the US with 1000 addresses and coming back around to me with 900 as the US decides some URI's in 100 of the addresses contain "illegal" content.  Vive le cloud!



Christian 

PS  We had a UK Wikipedia filtering case in 2010 that led to it going black (for many). 

December 2010 Wikipedia in UK went dark for most Internet users of the six major UK ISPs when the Internet Watch Foundation filtered a photograph of an album cover and some associated content of the Virgin Killers rock band. The filtering itself did not take things other than the targeted content "down". What happened is one of those unexpected consequences of one directional filtering in an interactive environment. 

Wikipedia found that it could not authenticate using IP addresses users editing content from these ISPs due to the operation of the "Cleanfeed" proxies and so pulled access. The actual content was perhaps risque but not illegal and the IWF backed down within a few days and removed the filter and so Wikipedia was happily restored. Of course no UK user who wanted to see the offending photograph was substantially inconvenienced as there are plenty of well known and easy ways to get around these filters. 



Christian



On 17 Jan 2012, at 07:41, Narelle Clark wrote:

> 
> 
>> It is only for the US-based users for the moment, but last year there
>> was similar in Italy, when the Italian Wikipedia was inaccessible.
> 
> So does that mean the "English" version (presumably where they correct all
> the spelling) available outside of the US will still be available??
> </joke>
> 
> Later on in the wikimedia article it says that it is a global action.
> 
>> On 1/17/2012 02:25, Fred Baker wrote:
>>> Do you think they could include HADOPI in that, or is this only about
>>> the US?
> 
> That's a fair comment.
> 
> Do you think HADOPI is equally outrageous, eg
> - long jail terms
> - extradition
> - require these entities to take all “technically feasible and reasonable
> measures” to prevent access
> 
> On what looks to be a poor basis of proof?
> 
> 
> Narelle
> 
> 
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