ICANN and Verisign Proposal Would Allow Any Government In The World To Seize Domain Names


Let me provide a few examples of what the “new world order” for domain names would be under the world envisioned by ICANN staff and Verisign:

The government of China orders domain names operating websites that are critical of its policies to be suspended (or simply transferred to the Chinese government).
The government of Russia, at war with Ukraine, orders the transfer of pro-Ukrainian domain names to the control of the Russian government.
The government of Ukraine, at war with Russia, orders the transfer of pro-Russian domain names to the control of the Ukrainian government.
The government of Texas orders pro-abortion domain names to be transferred to the Texas government.
The Taliban government in Afghanistan orders pro-abortion domain names, and those promoting education for girls, to be transferred to the government.
The government of Iran orders all domain names around the world with “adult” content (i.e. pornography) to be transferred to the Iranian government.
The government of Tuvalu, (which already licenses the .TV registry in order to raise funding) facing an economic crisis due to climate changes, orders that every 2-letter, 3-letter, and one-word dot-net be transferred to the Tuvalu government, in order to auction off the domain names to raise new funding for themselves.
A government in Argentina launches a new program whose name happens to be identical to the domain name owned by a French company for the past 25 years. The government of Argentina orders that the domain name be transferred to them, without compensation for the expropriation.
The government of Italy is upset about a social media company operating from China, and orders that the Chinese company’s domain name be transferred to the Italian government.
The UK government is upset that software published by a Swedish company has end-to-end encryption. It orders the domain name of the Swedish company be transferred to the UK government.

I’m sure readers can come up with their own examples of what would happen if governments are able to censor or seize domain names they don’t like or expropriate domain names that they covet, without due process for registrants.

Now, you might be thinking “Hey, I don’t live in or have any connection to China, Russia, or Afghanistan — those governments have no jurisdiction over me.” That’s how things are at present.
ICANN and Verisign propose to overturn centuries of legal debate over the nature of liability across jurisdictions with their outrageous proposal

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https://web.archive.org/web/20230420104443/https://freespeech.com/2023/04/19/red-alert-icann-and-verisign-proposal-would-allow-any-government-in-the-world-to-seize-domain-names/