On 12/02/2010 04:13 PM, Bill Silverstein wrote:
While the seizing1 of a domain name does effect all services with that domain name, it is not a risk of collateral damage to innocents. In your analogy, it is more like taking all containers which have stickers on the outside that states, "Property of Pirate Inc." It is also possible to take the domain name, and recreate the DNS records for the non-web services.
Let's take a simple case: Someone on facebook says they are selling Gucci purses. OK, take down facebook.com Simple.. Easy.. Fast But very, very wrong in terms of collateral damage. How can you know what other things a domain name represents? Remember domain names can contain information about geographic coordinates (lawful), text (I've got the Magna Carta in my DNS records, again lawful), VoIP service records (lawful), email exchange records (lawful), etc etc. One might argue, as I think you are arguing, that because so far we have mainly dealt with people who use domain names for exactly one overt purpose and that purpose is a website or email origination that is 100% illicit that every other accused domain name equally ought to be summarily condemned, tried, and executed. It is always easier to paint with a wide brush and accept the results than it is to do finely detailed work in which the results have few flaws. As humans we've been painting with a broad accusatorial brush for a long time. The progress of justice often goes hand in hand with the narrowing of the brush. Literature and history are filled with examples ranging from Othello's presumptions about Desdemona, the book "The Oxbow Incident", and the unrestricted torpedoing of passenger liners during WWI.
Now if the police come in and seize the server, which could handle hundreds of other web sites, that would be a server of another color.
Unfortunately "the police" (they usually aren't the kind of police who wear blue uniforms) do take entire server machines. Those of us who sometimes use cloud based hosting have reason to be nervous. I already left one co-lo facility because of the collateral damage done to our innocent machines by overzealous blacklists that included our machines simply on the basis of IP address proximity. I've spent some time last month discussing with various lawyers and law professors the idea that we need to create a law in the US (or in California) that would require those who assert internet reputations for use by others to conform to various standards of conduct. One of the mental models is the US Fair Credit Reporting Act that puts some (but not many) strictures on credit reporting agencies. Similar rules could be applied to those who operate on the net to assign status (like "saintly", "good", "bad", "evil", or "condemned" - or something more like a blacklist) for beyond mere personal consumption. --karl--