The U.S. government has mistakenly shut down 84,000 domains that were accused of distributing child pornography. The problem occurred when blocking a domain from an access provider, Free DNS, on which these thousands of subdomains depended. The owners of the same were surprised to see their page modified and in which appeared an official notice in which it was said that the advertising, transportation, distribution, collection and possession of child pornography constitutes a federal crime that carries penalties of up to thirty years in prison and fines of 250,000 dollars. The US authorities went to a judge to order the blocking of certain domains, ten, but an error caused the closure of a domain that housed the rest of 84,000 web pages.
The owner of FreeDNS published a note stating that his company had never hosted such abuses and that they were working to remedy the situation as quickly as possible.
After a few hours, the domain was reopened and progressively the subdomains are recovering their usual physiognomy. However, it is estimated that it will take three days to restore normalcy given the number of sites affected. Many of the affected domains belong to individuals or small businesses. Some of them have rushed to place on their website a notice in which they deny that they maintain any practice related to child pornography.
This episode takes place as part of a campaign to block Internet sites accused of pornography, counterfeiting or intellectual property infringement. This week in the fourth wave of lockdowns, authorities shut down 18 sites accused of selling counterfeit goods.
The U.S. takes advantage of its competence in controlling top-level domains (such as .com or .net) to deregister domains from suspicious sites. In a previous wave they shut down the Spanish site rojadirecta that offered links to live sports broadcasts owned by broadcasters.
At least 119 sites have been confiscated as part of this operation. The affected websites range from those that offer streaming views (without download) to stores of material suspected of being counterfeit.
These actions have reopened the controversy over the control that the United States can exercise over the management of Internet domains. The entity that regulates them, ICANN, a non-profit company that is governed by the laws of California, has this competence thanks to an assignment of the United States Department of Commerce that, for historical reasons of the birth of the Internet, has control of them.
Source: ElPais.com
