Howdy! We own your website now š¤
A European reminder this week, prompted by a judgment in, of all places, Texas.
A Texas court has just ordered Verisign, the registry that runs the entire .com namespace for the whole planet, to switch off the domain of an adult site headquartered in Luxembourg. The crime? Ignoring Texas's age-verification law. Not a US federal law, not a criminal charge, a state order. Verisign clicked their heels and complied.
Forget for a second what you think of the law or the website. What weāre seeing is a single US state, not the federal government, pulling the plug on infrastructure most of us consider neutral. No congress, no treaty, just a single judge in Texas.
This is not news to anyone who's been paying attention to how the DNS actually works. ICANN is in California. The registries for .com, .net, .org are US corporations. It doesn't matter who you are or where you live, if you're renting in that namespace, you're a phone call away from a US court order.
Most of the time that's a distinction without a difference. But "most of the timeā isnāt security architecture. And the last few years should have cured anyone of the idea that the political weather across the Atlantic is predictable.
If you havenāt done so already: register the .eu or local version of your domain while itās still boring and cheap. Point it at your current setup, and keep it ready to switch to if needed. Itās cheap insurance.
Colin