Freedom of speech is dead in this country.
This came about because Swiss Bank Julius Baer sued Dynadot, a domain name registration company, to have the domain www.wikileaks.org delisted because of documents posted on the site regarding Baer’s involvement in offshore money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands.
It appears that there was some evidence that Baer was conducting illegal activities, which a whistleblower posted on the wiki at WikiLeaks, a site dedicated to publicly posting allegations and evidence of corporate and government wrongdoings. The court ordered Dynadot to delete the domain; however, the site has yet to be shut down.
Judge Jeffrey White, the California district court judge who presided over the case, is now under scrutiny.
"This is a judge who doesn’t have a good understanding of the Internet," David Ardia of Harvard Law School told The Associated Press.
But the issue goes much deeper than that. The judge should have realized that people have a right to say what they want without the threat of being shut down by the U.S. government.
While there are legal measures to protect people and corporations from libel, silencing those making the accusations was not among those measures until this court decision. Furthermore, if copyrights were in fact violated, as Baer claims, a simple Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice would have sufficed to remove the "ill" content.
Unfortunately, the case was dismissed with prejudice, so it is highly unlikely that there will be an appeal of this decision. Therefore, no higher judge will have a chance to review the case and determine that White was clearly stepping out of bounds to assist a large corporation. No court has the authority to reinstate the domain name. Furthermore, with the way the domain was deleted, it cannot be re-registered with a new company.
This is a very dangerous precedent. It is now trivial for any group with enough money to silence its critics online. Simply deprive the Web site of its domain name, and its odds of being seen drop significantly, as few people are going to remember a server’s IP address.
While this is not the case for WikiLeaks, which is now available at www.wikileaks.be, other smaller operations dedicated to whistle blowing are now in danger of being effectively silenced if their domain name is registered with an American registrar.
Thankfully, the damage in this case has been confined by the simple fact that WikiLeaks is hosted not in the United States, but in Sweden, where the court’s decision did not mean that all of its data was removed from the Internet by this court decision.
One hopes the people at WikiLeaks will pursue the issue of their domain’s deletion by the court and will receive proper treatment by a different judge.
