Which entities should take down websites, and when?
There has been a lot of talk about censorship and taking down websites over the past couple of months. On today’s show, I talk with Tucows CEO Elliot Noss about the issue. Tucows is one of the world’s largest domain name registrars. We discuss the role that registrars and registries could play in taking down domains used for nefarious purposes, and how Noss’ take on the issue has changed over time. He also explains what Tucows is doing about it.
Also: New DNS Abuse Institute, a peachy domain sale, bitcoin domain, and more.
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“domains used for nefarious purposes”: Who decides when a domain is used for “nefarious” activity or not? In the actual “cancel culture”, NO ONE should have that “power”, unless it’s really really necessary (which is rare, IMHO). In any case, registrars shouldn’t be able to do it without a proper court order.
When you arrive around the 10mn mark, your guest is just becoming scary: Countries and courts won’t do something (I really understand “enough”), so we the registrars will start to become some bad vigilante because we think very highly of ourselves… Cancel culture at its finest 🙁
To me, the guy just made a 30mn advertisement for Unstoppable Domains & decentralized domains.
After finishing the podcast, I’m just asking myself the question: What are we even talking about, exactly? I’ve listened half an hour about the supposed need of taking more things down and the need of more “policing”. But WHAT would actually need to be taken down? It always stays very vague or not said at all.