Fyodor Vaskovich, a fellow CPSR board member had his site shut down by the domain name registrar GoDaddy. Facts are below..
Hey, you misspelled "allegations". Ben Butler, the head abuse guy at Godaddy, is a very reasonable guy whom I know personally. I believe the outline of this story, but the 52 second stuff smells rather odd and I want to hear his version, too.
My question - should ALAC and the user community involved in ICANN take up the issue of domain take downs by Registrars?
Sure, and this presents a good opportunity to think about who we mean when we say "At Large". There is a tendency to equate At Large with, basically, registrants of vanity domains. (See johnlevine.com and airinfo.aero, for example.) I think this is very shortsighted. To me, At Large means all the people who use the Internet, like the people who read my non-technical books. If you compare the billions of Internet users to the millions of Internet domains, it is quite clear that 99% of Internet users have never registered a domain and never will, but they use domains every time they click on a link or send an e-mail message. These are the primary users that At Large should be representing. I am not opposed to the concerns of the <1% who are registrants, being one myself, but it is absurd to treat their concerns as At Large's only interest. The vast majority of domain takedowns are due to phishes and other fraudulent and criminal activity, with the takedown not challenged by anyone. If Internet users have a reasonable fear that they will be targeted and harmed by criminals, which they certainly do these days, they will avoid using the net, and avoid speaking on-line. To the extent that we do not act like this matters, we are not addressing their needs, and we're not addressing their free speech concerns, either. I do not know enough about this particular case to know whether Godaddy's actions were reasonable, but I do note that the case concerns stolen personal information from tens of thousands of Myspace users, users whose interests I would think deserve as much attention from At Large as a single domain owner does. There is no simple answer here, since there are a lot of legitimate competing issues and concerns, but it is clear to me that a simplistic equation that argues that domains == free speech is just wrong. R's, John