

Ask HN: How and why is it so hard to keep illegal websites down? - joaojeronimo

I was wondering, how do authorities take down websites ? Can&#x27;t they ban a domain name from a registry, Why and how is thepiratebay.se still active ? Why is it so hard to take it down ? Why do authorities go after the servers and not the domain names ?<p>PS: I certainly don&#x27;t want to get into an argument on whether TPB and others should or not be taken down
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b0o
A reason why websites are so hard to take down is that they're so easy to set
up. For example, the video streaming link hosting website primewire.org/ag/com
was letmewatchthis.se/com/org/de and they all just reroute traffic. The point
is that they are exactly the same website. As long as the Internet is around
they can keep taking them down, but they'll just start again under a different
name, and word eventually gets around via reddit/4CHAN, word of mouth and the
cycle starts all over again. But recently I think link sharing websites are
not illegal but Google can't put them on the top of their search results or
something.

What's even better are the websites that they host their streams on are
constantly changing names since they keep getting taken down, or throttled but
the templates the websites use are exactly the same: the type of embedded
video players, the font, format, etc. The only thing they change is the color
and the name.

But yes banning a domain name is possible, or ICE can take it down but that
only applies to American websites.

It's impossible for websites to be taken down but it is possible to limit
their exposure and that is to have an American version of the great firewall,
but that'll never happen, hopefully...

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amirouche
A possible reason is that it's convenient for a lot of people, not only users.
For instance, tbt make it easy to learn english, spreading english culture and
keeping it dominant.

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leesalminen
Are you suggesting that any nation-state should have the ability to remove any
domain name in the world from the ICANN registry?

