Tech Briefing: Censorship and Top Level Domain Seizures

I read two article about Top Level Domain Seizures. In Spain, recently, the Catalonia region, which contains Barcelona, has been trying to secede. The Spanish Federal Government has declared this secession illegal, and has been taking steps to crack down on the secession. As part of this, the Spanish government has raided the .cat top-level domain registry, and took down over 140 domains. 

The top-level domain registry is essentially the service that resolves your website to where it is hosted. You can have a server hosting your content, but unless you use a top-level domain registrar to register your site, nobody can access your content. You could potentially just give the IP address of your server, but giving the direct address opens up a whole host of problems.

Taking down sites at the domain level has happened due to government action and court orders before, but something that is newly occurring is the domain registrars themselves taking down content. This is something that has traditionally never happened in the past, because domain registrars were not seen as being responsible for the content that they registered. It was typically seen as if an ink manufacturer was responsible for what someone used their ink to write.

However, recently, domain registrars have made the move of dropping sites based on the content. The first example was that of The Daily Stormer, a neo-nazi website. It got kicked off by GoDaddy's domain register service, and then Google's as well. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that this new method of shutting down websites due to their content is dangerous, as it consolidates the power of controlling speech into a very limited number of internet infrastructure providers. Essentially, if all of this small group of providers agreed to censor somebody, they could keep them from hosting any content on the internet.

Do you think that domain registrars should be able to censor content, or should they take a neutral approach to all content hosts?

Links:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/cat-domain-casualty-catalonian-independence-crackdown

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/no-justification-spanish-internet-censorship-during-catalonian-referendum

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/08/fighting-neo-nazis-future-free-expression