WyBlog

Coming soon, a kill switch for your web site

Barack Obama's Big Internet Kill Switch might never see the light of day. But that won't stop guys like Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) from finding other ways to mess with the internet.

Senator Hatch and a bipartisan group of Congressional censors have proposed giving the Department of Justice the pre-emptive authority to shut down your web site if there is a "suspicion" of piracy or copyright infringement. It's the Holy Grail of DMCA enforcement.

And how would they do this? By deleting your DNS record.

"What's a DNS record?", I hear you cry.

That's your website name. Mine is "wyblog.us". Fox News is "foxnews.com". Every web site has one. There are 13 "root servers" worldwide, each of which has a list of every web site name and instructions on how to reach it. Remove your web site name from those servers, and poof! you're off the air.

Registrars like GoDaddy.com and Network Solutions send thousands of DNS updates to the root servers every day. New names are added, old ones expire, sites change their location. Under the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act the DOJ could seek a court order from a judge directing the registrar to delete your DNS record.

All the big registrars operate in the U.S. So, no matter where in the world your web site is you are still subject to the whims of a DOJ bureaucrat.

For now they claim this kill switch is purely to combat copyright infringement. Sure. Once it's in place there's no telling what other infractions will warrant turning you off. Criticize Obamacare? Oops, where did that blog go? Recruit cannon fodder for Jihad? Who wouldn't want to turn that web site off? Recruit some guys in Montana for a milita? Might as well turn them off too. Hate speech? Down the memory hole.

But hey, Big Brother knows best, right?

Posted at 10:23 by Chris Wysocki   [/tech]   Comments | Archived | Perm Link |
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