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.
"Susan Crawford, a visiting law professor at Yale and a leading authority on Internet law, said the fact that many large domain name registrars are based in the United States gives the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, control "over a great deal of speech — none of which may be actually hosted in the US, about the US, or conflicting with any US rights."
"OFAC apparently has the power to order that this speech disappear," Professor Crawford said."
This article explains the underlying US law which authorized Cuba’s connection to the Internet:
"The so-called Torricelli Act, or Authorization and National Defense Act for Fiscal Year 1992, authorizing the connection of Cuba to Internet by satellite, with the condition that each megabyte (connection speed range) would be contracted with American companies or their subsidiaries and approved by the Treasury Department. Limited contracting was established and extraordinary sanctions – 50 000 dollar fines for each violation – for those favoring, within or without the United States, electronic business or the most minimal economic benefit for Cuba were instituted. All this has been thoroughly implemented and, little by little, OFAC has extended its black list to the delirious point the American newspaper has just revealed. Also, this Office has a larger staff devoting their energy to watch the citizens of this world traveling to Cuba or sending money to the country, than following transactions which might finance terrorism in the United States. In April 2004, OFAC informed the Congress that, of its 120 employees, four had been assigned the task of following the lead of Osama bin Laden’s and Saddam Hussein’s finances, while almost two dozen were intent in reinforcing the blockade against Cuba. They admitted that they used Internet as a fundamental source to follow leads on money."
Ars Technica also published an interesting article on the censorship angle of this story.