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US Govt Seizes Blacklisted Domain Names of European Company for Selling Cuba Trips

By Robin Gross

"An interesting story broke recently in the NY Times about a Spanish travel company that had its domain names taken away by the US Government for selling Europeans vacations to Cuba. Even though the company's business was not targeted at the US and was lawful in its national jurisdiction, the company's websites were put on a domain name blacklist maintained by the US Treasury Department. According to the NY Times, US Treasury officials contacted the Spanish company's domain name registrar, which is based in the US, and ordered that the websites be disabled, since it was "a generator of resources that the Cuban regime uses to oppress its people." Unfortunately this case is another example of the US Government using the Internet's Domain Name System to censor freedom of expression, violate due process, and interfere with the sovereign rights of other nations. The US Government has a history of leveraging its position as the legal jurisdiction in which ICANN, most of the world's registrars, and the registry that manages .com resides in order to impose its own national policy agendas on the entire world...."

Full post as published by IP Justice on March 11, 2008 (boomark / email).