alt Hacker NewsTexas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law
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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.
Default judgement, absolutely meaningless at this point as to how a court would rule against a plaintiff that actually showed up, respected the court’s authority, and defended itself.
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 domain name is motherless.com if that's what you wanted to know. It's a porn site.
Isn't motherless a European website? What the ffff?
Update: yeah https://opencorporates.com/companies/nl/30159632
So, stage set to ban GrapheneOS website internationally?
The sooner the US loses control over the internet the better.
So basically this whole thing is a ploy to get rid of porn: basically, censorship that vaguely tries not to look like censorship.
1. Instigate a completely impractical, rights-violating scheme for age verification that nobody in their right mind wants to implement.
2. Then, enforce it against whatever porn sites land in your jurisdiction at all, knowing that they, like everyone else, don't do the verification.
Am I close?
Suppose the porn site tries to implement it. How many people are going to hand over their personal info to a shady porn site? Most visitors are there anonymously for whatever free stuff they can watch.
Either way, the porn site is ... screwed. Implement age verification: 99% visitors now back-button out and find another porn site. Don't implement it: blocked or shut down.
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).
As far as I can tell it would be possible to build an age verification service based on an open source ZKP implementation such as Google's Longfellow [1] that would be acceptable to these laws, but would allow anonymous age verification. It would be similar to the system the EU is now trialing, except not limited to iOS and to Android devices with Google Play. Longfellow should be able to work with those but also most modern smart phones running any OS the supports the phone's secure element, and also desktop computers that have secure elements, and devices like YubiKeys.
You would have to verify your age with the age verification service to set things. The easiest way to make it so that is not a privacy risk is for the age verification service to be offered by some entity that already has your ID documents. In the EU that would be the governments themselves, but I don't think any US state governments are ready to do that.
The age verification service doesn't necessarily need to store copies of whatever ID you present. It just needs to know you are when it issues its ID documents that get bound to your device's secure element. If this service was offered by some entity that has a widespread physical presence (a bank would be perfect) you could go in, show ID in person, and get your device enrolled.
Even better would be for a trusted non-profit to run this, like the EFF or the ACLU. Yes, I know they don't want age verification to happen at all, but they are going to lose that one, and it would be prudent to try to make it so that people have a privacy preserving way to do it that can be used anonymously when that happens.
Anyway, once your device is set up verifying your age to a website would involve a protocol between your device in the website the uses a ZKP (Zero Knowledge Proof) to demonstrate to the website that the identify information the age verification service bound to the secure element on the your devices says your age is acceptable. The ZKP doesn't disclose anything else from your identidy information. (The web server sees your IP address of course, but they would see that without age verification too). Note that the age verification service has no idea when, or were, you age verify at a website.
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 just start purging sites back and forth?
Battlegrounds end up as torn up, muddy, desolate places. Turning the domain registry into a battleground is a bad idea. Over the long term, no one wins if we choose to fight there.
Oh look, Ken Paxton is bragging about accomplishing nothing.
So, what’s the safest domain tld that’s safe from all that craziness out there?
Well the site does not present Texas in a good light. Their .gov site presents me with this. Looks like they need to worry about their own site instead of worrying about out of state sites.
>Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead
> Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to www.texasattorneygeneral.gov. If you visit this site, attackers could try to steal information like your passwords, emails, or credit card details.
I don’t understand - was this site or company based in Texas?
Otherwise the general idea seems absurd that an individual state could freeze a domain impacting for the whole Internet…
(EDIT: I won’t lose any sleep at the loss of such scum but the general principle seems a bit strange.)
There's no such thing as "reasonable age verification measures". Its lie spread by fascists like Ken Paxton, the Heritage Foundation, and ton of other evil people.
I wonder when browsers will follow Brave's lead and support decentralized domains that can't be censored due to laws from half way across the world.
Definitely bad overall and opposed to the principle by which this is being done, but I am at least glad it happened to motherless. The last I saw of that site it had terrible moderation and hosted quite a bit of dubious material.
I guess by default all .com's have US jurisdiction? Because even if it's a default judgment, and the registrar is based out of the US, which seems to the case here, any court order from the US is able to take a domain down.
Found the case, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/07...
The Ninth Circuit held that the U.S. court had jurisdiction to proceed because VeriSign—the registry for all .com domains—was located in the United States.
The idea that a state court in one particular state can enforce such an absurd law against a company that likely has no business operations or servers in the state is ridiculous. I don't care if you like the porn site in question or not, or condone or endorse its content. This is a slippery slope towards every regional tinpot dictator legislature attempting to censor the internet by having an entity's domain name revoked.
.com in particular has also been well proven over the past 5 to 10 years to be vulnerable to federal court orders to seize domains at the registrar level. That's not really anything new. It's a known risk for anyone building a corporate brand/identity around a specific .com domain name. What's new is this is being done from the state court level. (Edit: To be clear, in my opinion, a US State court completely lacks jurisdiction on this matter).