Of course, this does not concern .coms only. Domains under any gTLD may 
be blacklisted. Below the report from the IHT.

--c.a.

======
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/04/america/speech.php

U.S. pulls the plug on Europeans who want to visit Cuba
By Adam Liptak
Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Steve Marshall is a British travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he 
sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. 
In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working because of the 
U.S. government.

The sites, in English, French and Spanish, had been online since 1998. 
Some, like Cuba-Hemingway.com, were literary. Others discussed Cuban 
history and culture, like Cuba-HavanaCity.com. Still others - 
CiaoCuba.com and BonjourCuba.com - were purely commercial sites aimed at 
Italian and French tourists.

"I came to work in the morning, and we had no reservations at all," 
Marshall said on the phone from the Canary Islands. "We thought it was a 
technical problem."

It turned out, though, that Marshall's Web sites had been put on a U.S. 
Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his domain name 
registrar, eNom, which is based in the United States, had disabled them. 
Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury 
Department; the company says it learned that the sites were on the 
blacklist through a blog.

Either way, there is no dispute that eNom shut down Marshall's sites 
without notifying him and has refused to release the domain names to 
him. In effect, Marshall said, eNom has taken his property and 
interfered with his business. He has slowly rebuilt his Web business 
over the past several months, and now many of the same sites operate 
with the suffix .net rather than .com, through a European registrar. His 
servers, he said, have been in the Bahamas all along.

Marshall said he did not understand "how Web sites owned by a British 
national operating via a Spanish travel agency can be affected by U.S. 
law." Worse, he said, "these days not even a judge is required for the 
U.S. government to censor online materials."

A Treasury spokesman, John Rankin, referred a caller to a press release 
issued in December 2004, almost three years before eNom acted. It said 
Marshall's company had helped Americans evade restrictions on travel to 
Cuba and was "a generator of resources that the Cuban regime uses to 
oppress its people." It added that U.S. companies must not only stop 
doing business with the company but also freeze its assets, meaning that 
eNom did exactly what it was required to do under U.S. law.

Marshall said he was uninterested in tourists who are U.S. citizens. 
"They can't go anyway," he said.

Peter Fitzgerald, a law professor at Stetson University in Florida who 
has studied the blacklist, said its operation was quite mysterious. 
"There really is no explanation or standard," he said, "for why someone 
gets on the list."

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 U.S., about the U.S. or conflicting 
with any U.S. rights."

"OFAC apparently has the power to order that this speech disappear," 
Crawford said.

The law under which the Treasury Department is acting has an exemption 
that seeks to protect "information or informational materials." 
Marshall's Web sites, though ultimately commercial, would seem to 
qualify, and it is not clear why they appear on the blacklist.

Unlike Americans, who face significant restrictions on travel to Cuba, 
Europeans are free to go there, and many do. Charles Sims, a lawyer with 
the firm Proskauer Rose in New York, said the Treasury Department might 
have gone too far in Marshall's case.

"The U.S can certainly criminalize the expenditure of money by U.S. 
citizens in Cuba," Sims said, "but it doesn't properly have any 
jurisdiction over foreign sites that are not targeted at the U.S. and 
which are lawful under foreign law."

Rankin, the Treasury spokesman, said Marshall was free to ask for a 
review of his case. "If they want to be taken off the list," Rankin 
said, "they should contact us to make their case."

That is a problematic system, Fitzgerald said. "The way to get off the 
list," he said, "is to go back to the same bureaucrat who put you on."

Last March, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights issued a disturbing 
report on the blacklist. Its subtitle: "How a Treasury Department 
Terrorist Watch List Ensnares Everyday Consumers."

The report, by Shirin Sinnar, said there were 6,400 names on the list 
and that, like no-fly lists at airports, it gave rise to endless and 
serious problems of mistaken identity.

"Financial institutions, credit bureaus, charities, car dealerships, 
health insurers, landlords and employers," the report said, "are now 
checking names against the list before they open an account, close a 
sale, rent an apartment or offer a job."

But Marshall's case does not appear to be one of mistaken identity. The 
government quite specifically intended to interfere with his business.

That, Crawford said, is a scandal. "The way we communicate these days is 
through domain names, and the Treasury Department should not be 
interfering with domain names just as it does not interfere with 
telecommunications lines," he said.