The US government has continued seizing domain names from registrants around the world that it believes have infringed on US law, with latest seizure being that of bodog.com, registered to Canadian Calvin Ayre for online gambling. Since the domain name is not registered to an American citizen or entity, it would be thought of as being out of bounds for the US government. But the US government takes the view that any .COM, .NET, .ORG, or .BIZ domain name is fair go. In the case of bodog.com, because the registry for .COM domain names is American, that is Verisign, then it is fair game for it to be seized.
"For years Ayre taunted and dodged U.S. law enforcement, specialising in offering online sports betting and casino games to U.S. gamblers," reported Forbes who broke the story.
Forbes also noted that in a 2006 cover story titled Catch Me If You Can, Ayre said "we run a business that can’t actually be described as gambling in each country we operate in. But when you add it together, it’s Internet gambling.""Rod Rosenstein, the U.S. Attorney in Baltimore, indicted Ayre and three other Canadian men, James Philip, David Ferguson and Derrick Maloney. None of the men are in custody and they are believed to be in Canada. The company, Bodog Entertainment Group, is also under indictment and its domain name has been seized by federal prosecutors.""Sports betting is illegal in Maryland, and federal law prohibits bookmakers from flouting that law simply because they are located outside the country," Rosenstein said in a statement.
"The ramifications of this are no less than chilling and every single organization branded or operating under .com, .net, .org, .biz etc needs to ask themselves about their vulnerability to the whims of US federal and state lawmakers (not exactly known their cluefulness nor even-handedness, especially with regard to matters of the internet)," commented Mark Jeftovic on the easyDNS blog.
EasyDNS, an internet infrastructure company, protested that the "ramifications of this are no less than chilling and every single organization branded or operating under .com, .net, .org, .biz etc. needs to ask themselves about their vulnerability to the whims of U.S. federal and state lawmakers."
Michael Geist, writing in a syndicated piece for Canadian newspapers, wrote that of an equivalent scenario to the seizure of bodog.com where a company’s key assets are seized, which would be met with outrage.
"Imagine a scenario in which a country enacts a law that bans the sale of asbestos and includes the power to seize the assets of any company selling the product anywhere in the world," wrote Professor Geist. "The country tests the law by obtaining a court order to seize key assets of a Canadian company, whose operations with hundreds of employees takes a major hit. The Canadian government is outraged, promising to support the company in its efforts to restore its operations.""Last week, much of this scenario became reality, though the product was not asbestos and the Canadian government has yet to respond."Geist notes that "In the Bodog.com case, U.S. officials targeted a site with limited connections to the country as the site had licensed out the bodog.com domain name in 2006 and stopped accepting U.S. bettors late last year."Outlining the background to the case, Geist notes "the domain name was registered in Canada with Vancouver-based Domain-Clip. In past years, registering a domain name with a non-U.S. registrar and avoiding U.S. servers was viewed as sufficient to fall outside U.S. jurisdiction. This is because a court order requiring the domain name registrar to transfer ownership of the domain (or redirect the site) was only enforceable in the jurisdiction in which it was issued.""No longer."Geist concludes saying that "in an era when governments are becoming increasingly active in regulating online activities, the Bodog. com case provides a warning that by using popular dot-com domain names, companies and registrants are effectively opting-in to U.S. law and courts as part of the package."However a way around this situation for some might be to carefully select a country code Top Level Domain in the right jurisdiction. One recently to do this was The Pirate Bay who moved to the .SE ccTLD.
"Without SOPA or PIPA, the Justice Department lacks any mechanism to prevent Americans from visiting sites that are on a domain not controlled by a U.S. corporation," said Wired. "Knowing that, the world’s leading BitTorrent site, The Pirate Bay, recently switched its main site from a .org domain to .se, the handle for Sweden."
