I wanted to share with NCUC members the news below. Fyodor Vaskovich  
is a CPSR board member, and as such this issue is one that I've  
recommended CPSR try to take up with ICANN through NCUC and other  
appropiate mechanisms.

I'm not sure what the appropriate  course of action and protest might  
be - so, look for people's comments.

regards

Robert

--

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6153607.html

GoDaddy pulls security site after MySpace complaints
By Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: January 25, 2007, 5:20 PM PTi


GoDaddy pulls security site after MySpace complaints A popular  
computer security Web site was abruptly yanked offline this week by  
MySpace.com and GoDaddy, the world's largest domain name registrar,  
raising questions about free speech and Internet governance.

MySpace demanded that GoDaddy pull the plug on Seclists.org, which  
hosts some 250,000 pages of mailing list archives and other  
resources, because a list of thousands of MySpace usernames and  
passwords was archived on the site. GoDaddy claims its customers own  
about 18 million domains.

GoDaddy complied. In a move that Seclists.org owner Fyodor Vaskovich  
said happened with no prior notice, the company deleted his domain  
name--causing his site to be effectively unreachable for about seven  
hours on Wednesday until he found out what was happening and removed  
the password list.

"They didn't tell me why they removed the site," Vaskovich, creator  
of the popular Nmap security auditing utility, said in a phone  
interview. "At a very minimum, we should get warning."

Vaskovich said he spent "hours and hours" on the phone with GoDaddy  
on Wednesday before he finally got through to someone who was willing  
to listen. As a result of this experience, he said in an e-mail  
announcement, "I'm in the market for a new registrar. One who doesn't  
immediately bend over for any large corporation who asks."

For her part, GoDaddy general counsel Christine Jones defended the  
abrupt deletion, saying: "We tried to contact the registrant, but  
they were not available at the time. To protect the MySpace users  
from potentially having private information revealed, we removed the  
site."

Jones pointed out that GoDaddy's terms of service say the company  
"reserves the right to terminate your access to the services at any  
time, without notice, for any reason whatsoever."

Jones and Vaskovich, however, tell substantially different versions  
of exactly what happened. Jones characterized the episode as lasting  
only about an hour, saying her abuse department unsuccessfully "tried  
to contact" Vaskovich and "he actually contacted us about an hour"  
later after the removal occurred.

But Vaskovich provided CNET News.com with a log of correspondence  
from GoDaddy that corroborates his version of the story. It indicated  
that only 52 seconds elapsed from an initial voice mail notification  
to the time the domain was marked as "suspended." GoDaddy did not  
immediately respond to follow-up questions.

Vaskovich says MySpace did not contact him directly. MySpace declined  
to respond to repeated inquiries on Thursday.

Michael Froomkin, a law professor at the University of Miami who has  
written about domain name regulation, says this is the first time  
he's heard of a registrar abruptly taking a customer offline without  
a court order.

"Some people might feel safer with a registrar that's a little more  
pro-customer," Froomkin said.

Froomkin said this week's incident raises novel free speech  
questions--not legal ones, as long as GoDaddy's terms of service are  
broad enough. Rather, he said, the issue is "the quality of their  
review" of complaints received from firms like MySpace.

GoDaddy's Jones said that "we're not knee-jerk--we try to be  
responsible about verifying complaints." There's a broad spectrum of  
policies among domain name registrars, she acknowledged, with GoDaddy  
"probably the most aggressive."

But, Jones said, GoDaddy has a 24-hour abuse department that deletes  
domain names used for spam or child pornography on a daily basis.  
"We're not here to allow people to put illegal content on the  
Internet," she said. "We take this safety and the security of the  
Internet very seriously...We take our responsibility pretty  
seriously. We're the largest registrar in the world."

When asked if GoDaddy would remove the registration for a news site  
like CNET News.com, if a reader posted illegal information in a  
discussion forum and editors could not be immediately reached over a  
holiday, Jones replied: "I don't know...It's a