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Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

texasattorneygeneral.gov

181–190 of 323 posts

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#181
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to keep the domain name you got from a TLD that they control, yes. Or did you mean, like, morally?

But does a US State control a TLD, really? Is that even something that's within the legitimate legal power of an individual state? Previous .com seizures have been done at the federal court level. The federal government reserves the authority to regulate all inter-state commerce. The entire history of how the .com TLD is run by Verisign is federal government related. Doing this at the state court level is as nonsensi…

I don’t like it. But since when US or US entities have been doing things affecting rest of the globe that they can “legally” do or they “should” do? With US - they do things because they “can” do things. And now so does China and to some extent Russia.

And why even a “US federal” court should have such arbitrary and sweeping authority that affects other countries’ businesses and people? The world should realise that “.com” is a US domain in technicality and spirit both (like many other domains)

This is one of the extremely broken aspect of “The Internet”. Large part of it is literally controlled by US with zero oversight or shared authority.

PS. Look at how India recently moved all bank domains to https://.bank.in. And I usually don’t agree with my Govt (and for good reason) but this is a proper sovereignty move.

(Oh by the way ICANN is “still” in the US)

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#182
post #55

This kills their operations in other states that do not have this. Not sure how this does not violate interstate commerce. Contact your congress criter: https://www.congress.gov/ BTW: Kick - Melborne, AU. US Operations: SanFran CA. Registar: Verisign - Reston, VA.

Common complaint is that government enforcement of laws is insufficient, i.e. fines are only x% of their worldwide revenue. Sounds like this way has teeth and might force companies to actually obey the law?

it doesnt have teeth if its unconstitutional

otherwise they could just send the texas rangers to canada to go kill the execs in montreal

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#183
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wrote this in the passive voice; it doesn't say who is doing the blocking. Pornhub itself is doing the blocking; it uses geolocation and denies services to IP addresses from jurisdictions with age verification laws. The laws are usually not structured so as to require a third party such as an ISP to block noncompliant sites; instead, the governments of the states with those laws can sue the porn sites and their s…

> You wrote this in the passive voice I used the language of the link. > The explicit tube site Pornhub is now blocked in 25 U.S. states I had assumed that the states were blocking Pornhub but reading between the lines in the linked article it does imply it's not the states are not applying technical blocks.

The states have applied intentionally onerous requirements onto these sites with full knowledge that would most likely not comply making them de facto blocks. You wouldn't be fooled if a gangster said "that's some nice kneecaps you got there, it would be a shame if something happened to them" so I don't know why we are acting so naive about Texas and co.

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#184
post #173

I took a quick look at the Texas law. Like a few other such laws it allows sites to use an external service to do the check, as long as the service uses a "commercially reasonable" method of doing that. That basically means it has to be based on government ID or by inference based on certain types of transaction records they can get access to (e.g., if you have a mortgage they can reasonably infer you are an adult).…

> Even better would be for a trusted non-profit to run this, like the EFF or the ACLU.

You're seriously proposing that organizations along the same general lines as the EFF or ACLU would be okay with being the implementing partner of a "papers, please" identify verification regime? I highly doubt their leadership would entertain the idea for even the briefest moment.

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#186
post #75
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even people with mothers shouldn't travel to Texas.

> Even people with mothers shouldn't travel to Texas. You know real, friendly, generous humans live in Texas, right?

clearly more real, non-friendly, non-generous humans live in texas, who want their government to portray itself in such a way live in texas.

a reasonable number of those people is 10-15%, not 51%+

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#187
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign (Under "Controversies".) > In March 2012, the U.S. government declared that it has the right to seize domains ending in .com, .net, .cc, .tv, .name, and .org if the companies administering the domains are based in the U.S. The U.S. government can seize the domains ending in .com, .net, .cc, .tv, and .name by serving a court-order on Verisign, which manages those domains.

Texas isn’t the US government?

is verisign a texas company? id assume delaware, and so delaware, and the federal government have jurisdiction, not texas

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#188
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today I learned that a foreign government operates in Texas. I didn't know that Texas is supporting and promoting the North Korean government: http://naenara.com.kp/main/index/en/first I wonder why they aren't being called out for anti-American terrorist groups.

Not a .com domain, so out of reach. Anything within US reach, individuals or entities, is fair game from a US judicial system perspective. Everyone learns this the hard way, it seems.

you'll find people in the thread saying that if its accessible in texas, its in Texas

under that setup, yes, twxas is illegally breaking US sanctions against north korea

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#190
post #60

Honest question: what is the ultimate end game if at some point a court in another country orders a domain be reinstated? Do we end up with a domain registration system per country?

The winner of that battle will be wherever the DNS is hosted. Which is the USA. Even several ccTLDs are hosted in the USA and must obey USA law above the law of that country.

Which ones?
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