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

texasattorneygeneral.gov

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

#131

Post by inigyou »

walrus01 wrote: post #101
jasonfarnon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that is necessary for jurisdiction? It's doing business with TX customers every time it serves an ad to someone there. The law governing sufficient contacts for internet companies has been pretty well established since the 2000s.

> It's doing business with TX customers every time it serves an ad to someone there By this same logic if my web server physically located in Canada, the USA or Iceland serves LGBTQ content to people in Uganda I should be held liable or dragged into a Ugandan court under some of Uganda's anti-LGBTQ laws? https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=uganda+an...

Uganda would certainly issue a judgement against you. The difference would be their inability to enforce it because none of the relevant parts of the DNS operate in Uganda.

It's now well-established on the Internet that a court may force anyone in the path to enforce their decision. ISPs are regularly forced to block foreign websites, without any implication of liability on the ISP's part, simply because the ISP has the technical ability to block them and the court has the ability to enforce an order on the ISP. This is the case when Spanish ISPs have to block Cloudflare. The same applies to the DNS, which is based in America. Thanks to Texas for publicizing this DNS vulnerability which must urgently be fixed.

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

#132

Post by inigyou »

wolpoli wrote: 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.

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

#133

Post by walrus01 »

15155 wrote: post #33
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that, more appropriately, only affects internet users in that country (ignoring the cloudflare network blocking that causes various other sites to also be blocked). This appears to basically wipe the site from the entire internet, for all countries.

When you create the infrastructure, you make the rules. If a party doesn't like those rules, they are free to create their own replacement infrastructure and obtain global buy-in. ccTLDs already exist and their respective countries have sovereignty over those TLDs: the UK can disappear any .uk domain name it wants from the global internet. The .com TLD is American, and is therefore subject to American legal proceedin…

> The .com TLD is American, and is therefore subject to American legal proceedings.

Ample precedent and prior case law exists that the US Federal government can obtain court orders to seize .COM domains. Going back 15 years now.

State government that's another question entirely. When people say "American legal proceedings", the distinction between state courts and federal courts have two very different regions of responsibility and authority.

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

#134

Post by inigyou »

gamblor956 wrote: post #102
msftgreed wrote: post #34

So a state (or municipality or anyone capable of making laws) has the ability to say, "You don't meet our local laws, take down your URL" now? This is going to be a real problem when states start nuking whole parts of the internet from orbit. A state has a law against conversion therapy and starts to remove sites with that? A state has a law against trans people? Or abortion? Or medical misinformation? Suddenly we ju…

This is a pretty clear violation of the First Amendment, but the current SCOTUS doesn't care about the Constitution. Multiple conservative SCOTUS justices openly admit to taking bribes from parties with cases before them.

I believe the current precedent is that porn is not speech.

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

#135

Post by clipsy »

gnabgib wrote: post #75
antonvs wrote: 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?

Real, friendly, generous humans live in Haiti, too. That doesn't make it a good travel destination.

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

#136

Post by missingcolours »

monksy wrote: 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?

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

#137

Post by abraham »

Zak wrote: post #51
abraham wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this pornhub is blocked in 25 states including Texas. https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-blocked-states-2025

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.

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

#138

Post by inigyou »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #116
behringer wrote: post #114

The sooner the US loses control over the internet the better.

Just for clarity's sake, what is "the Internet", and how does "the United States" have "control" over it? https://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg?si=AL91MHC5q5yg2jnA

The USA controls ICANN and IANA, who together control the DNS root, as well as controlling all so-called "generic" TLDs through ICANN. Only some country TLDs are actually outside of US jurisdiction, as many of the delegate to USA-based registry providers. ICANN/IANA still control whether or not those countries even get to have domains, so the USA could decide that if the Netherlands wouldn't block motherless-dot-nl then .nl shall no longer exist.

DNS being centralised in the USA was potentially problematic when they weren't abusing their power. Now that they are actually abusing their power, it is actually problematic.

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

#139

Post by Pxtl »

gnabgib wrote: post #75
antonvs wrote: 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?

I'm sure there are friendly and generous humans also living in North Korea and Iran. Doesn't mean I want to risk subjecting myself to their government's authority.

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

#140

Post by inigyou »

monksy wrote: post #76
TylerE wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No more than the government of France is the EU government.

It's more like the government of Hungry or Bulgaria in the EU analogy.

Texas isn't like a small corrupt country. It's like a big corrupt important country, like Germany. If it was small and corrupt it would be ignorable.
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