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Deutsch: US-Razzien gegen Domains und IP-Adressen gehen weiter
US authorities have resumed their "Operation in Our Sites" in order to attempt to fight counterfeit and piracy-related websites. During this second annual "Cyber Monday" crackdown, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has shut down 150 websites from all over the world.
The recent introduction of draft bills, such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) now aims at providing a legal basis for domain names and IP address seizures. SOPA's broad definitions could indeed mean that no online resource in the global Internet would be outside US jurisdiction.
In response to these legislative proposals and repeated unilateral measures against European websites, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on 17 November 2011 in preparation of the EU/US summit stressing "the need to protect the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names." The joint EU/US summit declaration published on 28 November 2011 indeed says: "We share a commitment to a single, global Internet, and will resist unilateral efforts to weaken the security, reliability, or independence of its operations".
However, despite the big show of opposition to the US bills and the Parliament's actions, Internet filtering and blocking schemes like SOPA and PIPA are still on the agenda on the other side of the Atlantic claiming worldwide jurisdiction for domain names and IP addresses. According to recent reports, attempts to terminate the Internet's end-to-end architecture also seem to get even closer to the core of the Internet. This sort of access restriction is an experiment with key functions of the Internet, increasing the risk of fragmentation of the global Internet and as one co-chair of RIPE's DNS Working group stated, this gives restrictive tools "to the bad guys".
Another attempt to govern the Internet is for instance the latest international law enforcement action by the FBI against a large botnet. During this action, the FBI, without a court order or without a legal basis, took over the address blocks used by the botnet's nameservers and then assigned those address blocks to Internet Systems Consortium's (ISC) nameservers. The European Regional Internet Registry RIPE-NCC was rather concerned about the implications of getting involved in policy and governance issues and has now sued the public prosecutor's office to get a judicial decision on the question whether they had sufficient legal ground to order the temporary "lock" of the registrations. The implications of RIPE having to respond to such orders, particularly due to the very wide geographic coverage of its activities, would be very severe indeed.
List of blocked web sites by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
(28.11.2011)
http://www.ice.gov/doclib/news/releases/2011/111128washingtondc.pdf
EU-US Summit Resolution by the European Parliament (15.11.2011)
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=MOTION&referenc...
EU-US Summit Joint Declaraion (28.11.2011)
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/11/842
Civil society, human rights groups urge Congress to reject the Stop
Online Piracy Act (15.11.2011)
https://www.accessnow.org/policy-activism/press-blog/urge-congress-to-...
IP Watch: Filtering and Blocking Closer To The Core Of The Internet?
(20.11.2011)
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2011/11/20/filtering-and-blocking-close...
RIPE NCC Intends to Seek Clarification from Dutch Court on Police Order to
Temporarily Lock Registration (16.11.2011)
https://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/news/about-ripe-ncc-and-rip...
(Contribution by Kirsten Fiedler - EDRi)