
White supremacist forum site Stormfront seized by domain hosts - fooey
http://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/2017/08/26/white-supremacist-forum-site-stormfront-seized-domain-hosts/604902001/
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Powerofmene
This is scary more than interesting in my opinion. First let me say, I am not
addressing this issue in the context of free speech. That issue has been
rehashed on HN over and over. Instead, I am questioning these actions from the
context of the power that Network Solutions is exercising in taking down and
essentially seizing a website. Short of having a court order, which is not
made clear, I am stunned that this is able to take place.

>The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has claimed responsibility
for the site's removal. Executive Director Kristen Clarke said in an email
that the nonprofit group has "taken action against Stormfront."

A nonprofit has "taken action against Stormfront." What kind of action has it
taken that allows it to have a site in essence seized and taken down?

This should be a concern to an business that has an internet presence that may
have a difference of opinion with any other person/organization. While I do
not agree with Stormfront or their rhetoric, I also do not agree with seizing
a website from its owner without some type of legal action or court order to
do so. More needs to be said on what happened here or we should all be
concerned about these actions.

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ryanlol
>A nonprofit has "taken action against Stormfront." What kind of action has it
taken that allows it to have a site in essence seized and taken down?

Sending a bunch of abuse emails tends to work.

>This should be a concern to an business that has an internet presence that
may have a difference of opinion with any other person/organization. While I
do not agree with Stormfront or their rhetoric, I also do not agree with
seizing a website from its owner without some type of legal action or court
order to do so. More needs to be said on what happened here or we should all
be concerned about these actions.

This happens 1000s of times every day, but people only seem to be worried when
it's Nazi sites that get taken down. Nobody gets worried when domain
registrars shut down 1000s of "malware" and "phishing" domains every day with
little to no verification based on abuse reports from automated scripts

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Powerofmene
As I said, this has nothing to do with whose site was removed nor am I
addressing the concept of free speech, I was only asking about the ability to
take down a website and someone such as Netwoek Solutions to seize it and
refuse to release it to be moved to another host. I am not speaking
specifically about Stormfront as I don't know anything about them beyond what
the article posits. I was saying we should be concerned when a site can be
taken down and the domain seized without further information.

You state that it happens 1,000 times a day. You certainly know more than me
on this, but in these cases is the domain frozen or seized? It just seems
there was more to the story than was told.

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ryanlol
>You state that it happens 1,000 times a day. You certainly know more than me
on this, but in these cases is the domain frozen or seized? It just seems
there was more to the story than was told.

Okay so, this article was written by monkeys. Author interprets
"clientTransferProhibited" and a bunch of other irrelevant flags as the domain
being seized, which isn't at all what these mean. The only domain status flag
relevant here is the "clientHold".

This domain wasn't "seized", it's a normal clientHold. Stormfront can still
transfer to another registrar, but on some registrars that can be a little
tricky. For a domain seizure generally you'd expect to see "serverHold", whois
lizardsquad.org for example.

~~~
Powerofmene
Thank you for that explanation. I was confused by the wording of the article.

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rdiddly
Ultimately what he says remains true: private companies aren't compelled to
let somebody use their services. This makes it all the more important, in my
opinion, not necessarily to keep trying to reform or care about how private
companies handle various things, but rather for public institutions (those
under public control, roughly speaking), to continue to provide a public, non-
internet way to engage with those institutions. For example, a lot of local
governments now, you get the sense they won't pay attention to you unless you
go (or threaten to go) on Twitter. So at that point having a Twitter account
is a prerequisite for democracy a little bit. I mean Twitter's fine and all,
but what if you run afoul of their terms of service somehow, or what if they
simply invoke their right to refuse service to anyone? Neither of those has
anything to do with your rights as a citizen, and shouldn't affect them.

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CM30
This is interesting, if only because the domain registrar hasn't dropped the
domain or site, but outright disabled it so the site owners can't access it.
Wonder what kind of legal threat they could have received that caused the
domain registrar to do that?

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Melchizedek
I think it's obvious that we are seeing an organized campaign against white
nationalists and the alt-right, and even against some ordinary nationalists
and conservatives.

From YouTube, to Paypal, to Patreon, to GoDaddy, to Cloudflare, to Google, to
Airbnb, to Discord, to Twitter, etc, etc. It's too much and too quick not to
be at least partly organized by some group(s) or entity.

