BBC News: Whistle-blower site taken offline

By Selwyn Duke

About a month ago I wrote a piece titled "The Race for the American Mind," which deals with free speech and discusses ways in which commentary on the Internet can be easily stifled.  Among the methods I discussed was one relating to domain registrars.  I wrote:

". . . registrars may even freeze their domains [those of sites disseminating information the powerful don't want to hear] (a hosting company provides a site's 'edifice'; a domain is its 'address').  They may be consigned to Internet oblivion."

Well, a good example of this is in the news right now.  BBC News reports about a whistle-blower site named Wikileaks.org, which has had its domain frozen after a California court order.  Writes the BBC:

. . . the main site was taken offline after the court ordered that Dynadot, which controls the site's domain name, should remove all traces of wikileaks from its servers.

The court also ordered that Dynadot should "prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court."

Other orders included that the domain name be locked "to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar" to prevent changes being made to the site.

I won't say much about this particular action, although it does seem a bit heavy-handed. But it's a good example of how government can silence any Internet entity it wishes with the stroke of a pen. Thus, we should heed the words of that apocryphal (no, neither Goldwater nor Reagan originated it) saying:

"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."

Unfortunately, since many Americans today have been sold on socialism (although they call it something else), good luck convincing them of this Truth.