LA Times Defends DNS
The Los Angeles Times has come out in support of our position on recursive DNS filtering!
The main problem with the bill is in its effort to render sites invisible as well as unprofitable. Once a court determines that a site is dedicated to infringing, the measure would require the companies that operate domain-name servers to steer Internet users away from it. This misdirection, however, wouldn’t stop people from going to the site, because it would still be accessible via its underlying numerical address or through overseas domain-name servers.
A group of leading Internet engineers has warned that the bill’s attempt to hide piracy-oriented sites could hurt some legitimate sites because of the way domain names can be shared or have unpredictable mutual dependencies. And by encouraging Web consumers to use foreign or underground servers, the measure could undermine efforts to create a more reliable and fraud-resistant domain-name system. These risks argue for Congress to take a more measured approach to the problem of overseas rogue sites.
Indeed.
It does seem a bit short-sighted to try to take them out at the DNS level. After all, people weren’t too deterred from going to WikiLeaks once their .org went down (and later, the .ch). Rather, it just caused people to use the server address and mirror the content on other sites (P2P download).
There are other ways to resolve it as well, by using something like Tor2Web, hidden services, making sites members-only, replacing domains etc etc.
There are definitely some interesting possibly case studies here. =)