No domain is outside the reach of Uncle Sam! Kind of disgusting watching VeriSign collude with the federal government to shutter sites clearly outside of our jurisdiction. ---- http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-sites/ When U.S. authorities shuttered sports-wagering site Bodog.com last week, it raised eyebrows across the net because the domain name was registered with a Canadian company, ostensibly putting it beyond the reach of the U.S. government. Working around that, the feds went directly to VeriSign, a U.S.-based internet backbone company that has the contract to manage the coveted .com and other generic top-level domains Such seizures are becoming commonplace under the Obama administration. For example, the U.S. government program known as Operation in Our Sites acquires federal court orders to shutter sites it believes are hawking counterfeited goods, illegal sports streams and unauthorized movies and music. Navas said the U.S. government has seized 750 domain names, most with foreign-based registrars. The United States would have won even more control over the internet with the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. But the nations biggest online protest ever scuttled the measures, which would have allowed the government to force internet service providers in the U.S. to prevent Americans from being able to visit or find in search engines websites that the U.S. government suspected violated U.S. copyright or trademark law. But as the Justice Department demonstrated forcefully with the takedown of Megaupload, just a day after the nets coordinated anti-SOPA protest, it still has powerful weapons to use, despite the deaths of SOPA and PIPA.
No doubt, but a lot of folks (including me) believed that if you were registered outside the US, the US federal government would have no jurisdiction. As we can see though, we apparently don't care anymore. I suspect the site will be back up soon under a new domain name, but I'm concerned that VeriSign is involved, they were supposed to be a private entity outside of the influence of politics... again, obviously not.
Another fine example of the government trying to protect people from themselves. This war on internet gambling has been waging for years. If the government was smart, they would regulate it, and collect a significant amount of revenue from it.
