A Wonderful Reason To Have A Domain Outside Dot-COM .COM

The United States Department of Homeland Security has seized over 70 domains for Copyright and Trademark Violations - at least in their opinion. No notice, no court conviction, and in at least one instance, no real reason IMHO.

Of course the concept of "Homeland Security" seizing any internet domain for reasons of copyright is pretty outrageous in any case - talk about overstepping their original mandate.

This is an excellent reason for all outside the US to at least add their local country's domain to their list of domains instead of relying upon COM, NET, ORG, EDU, and of course the GOV and MIL which are supposed to be US only anyway.

Back in 2009, ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, was divorced from the control of the United States; thank all the dieties you might pray to!

This means that, despite their heavy influence on at least some of the core facilities of the net, there is really no way that the US and their DHS can do more than annoy most country's registered domains without going through some legal channels. No longer are all the root domain name servers under the thumb of good ol' Uncle Sam.

On the other hand, there are a LOT of companies and organizations that don't have any other domain than their original COM, ORG, NET domains, including yours truly. Rest assured that will change in my case. The sooner I don't have to worry about the idiots South of the 49th parallel getting upset with me because I believe in something slightly different from what the RIAA and MPAA think regarding copyright, the better.

So what triggered this sudden nationalism and anti-COM/NET/ORG feeling?

The fact is that DHS seized Torrent-Finder.COM - a search engine that does NOT harbour or host any copyright-infringing content but simply finds ANY bit torrent style feed, including all those non-infringing ones that I use like feeds for various Linux (aka Open Source, Free, non-infringing, nothing to do with MPAA or RIAA) distributions and changes. Torrent-Finder.COM simply listed other torrent sites, just as Google, Bing, and other search engines list content on other sites.

Govern yourselves accordingly. Leave your COM domains in place but move toward some outside (the US) controlled TLD (top level domain) such as your own country domain.

richard

ps. A man of my word, the domains digital-rag.ca, fireplug.ca, now-pages.ca, pacdat.ca and p-zip.ca are now mine. There are some behind the scenes things I have to do to get truly out from under the thumb of Uncle Sam's DHS, but this is a start. You should all do the same.

pps. Netfirms.com has cheap CA domain registrations :)