In the case against WikiLeaks.org, news that the judge who signed the order to take down the site and lock the domain to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar is now reconsidering his actions after pressure from privacy and civil rights advocates.
Top brands face up to 10,000 “brandjacking” incidents a week from cybersquatters who are trying to pass off fake sites as genuine, according to new reports.
An op-ed in Forbes takes on the challenges of Internet sovereignty. Online businesses have traditionally taken the position that they would be subject to onerous burdens if they had to comply with the laws of every jurisdiction. Yet, there are now legal precedents established that companies must obey local laws despite the unwritten law of Internet freedom.
MySpace’s agreement last month with 49 state attorneys general to make social networking sites safer created an investigative task force to forestall pre-emptive legal or legislative solutions on the issue. A member of the task force cautions the task force to acknowledge that the scope of its investigation must not begin and end with a search for a workable age verification technology. The legal and policy issues raised by age verification must be considered as well. The task force will release quarterly updates and make recommendations by the end of the year.
The business industry weighed in yesterday at an NTIA meeting on the agency’s mid-term review of its joint project agreement (JPA) with ICANN. NetChoice Coalition Executive Director Steve DelBianco said a "false sense of security" marks the mid-term review, which is like the first half of a school semester. ICANN’s fast-track development of internationalized domain names contrasts with the world’s view of the project as an "abject failure," and the Internet Governance Forum is "waiting for a failure" at ICANN to strengthen its hand in moving Internet governance to the UN, he said, reported by Washington Internet Daily.