Israeli,
US terror victims could ‘own’ Iran’s Internet
Please
note the Comment from Graham concerning this article:
Keep an
eye on the ten day demand that ICANN have received to switch off the DNS
servers for Iran (.ir) based domains. The court hearing last week in California
was a complete “Zioneesta” joke. For those who may not know, every website has
an IP address. What DNS servers do is map that IP address to a known domain
name.
For
example, if PressTV disappears (www.presstv.ir),
people just need to use their actual IP address (217.218.67.231) by entering it
into their browser. Takes one to the exact same place. Reverse DNS
lookup does the opposite. It resolves the IP address to a known domain name.
* * * * * *
*
Source: The Times of Israel
DAVID SHAMAH
June 25, 2014, 3:45 pm
Updated: June 25, 2014, 9:35 pm
Thanks to G.
DAVID SHAMAH
June 25, 2014, 3:45 pm
Updated: June 25, 2014, 9:35 pm
Thanks to G.
A
decision by an American court would allow for the Islamic Republic to be kicked
off the web altogether
A United
States court on Tuesday effectively awarded a group of American and Israeli
victims of Iranian terror the rights to the .ir domain, the suffix used to identify
Iranian websites, along with all of Iran’s IP addresses.
As a
result, said the group’s attorney, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner of the Shurat Hadin Law Center, Iran could find itself kicked off the
Internet by ICANN, a Los Angeles-based organization that manages the web.
The
United State District Court decided that the .ir domain name, along with Iran’s IP
addresses — without which Iranian websites cannot be included in the World Wide
Web — were assets that could be seized to satisfy judgments against the Islamic
state of more than a billion dollars, owed by Iran to Israeli and US
victims of terror perpetrated by the Hamas and Hezbollah organizations, among
others.
As a
result, Shurat Hadin, representing those victims, could collect the fees Iran
pays to keep its Internet going — or force an auction of Iran’s Internet assets
to satisfy the judgment.
The court
decision comes as part of Shurat Hadin’s efforts to collect judgments against Iran
awarded over the past 10 years by various US courts. Darshan-Leitner’s team has
successfully proved in American courts that Iran funded terror groups that
killed and injured Israeli and US citizens — and that, as the responsible
party, it was obligated to compensate victims and their families for losses.
Faced
with Iranian refusal to provide such compensation, Darshan-Leitner has
been pursuing these judgments in the courts. “We’ve been able to seize numerous
Iranian assets to satisfy these judgments,” Darshan-Leitner told The Times of
Israel. “Last year, for example, we were awarded a building on New
York’s Fifth Avenue, and we have a case pending for seizure of an Iranian
government-owned art collection at the University of Chicago.”
But
Tuesday’s decision could turn out to have the most impact. Internet domain
names are licensed to countries around the world by ICANN, the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an agency related to the US
Department of Commerce which administers the World Wide Web. Each country gets
its own suffix, enabling web users to identify the location of a site – for
example, Israeli sites get the suffix .il — and allowing local administrators
in each country to more easily manage the Internet in their own country.
Like
other countries, Iran pays fees to ICANN to license its Internet assets. The US
District Court ruled that those fees, along with the assets themselves, could
be used to satisfy the Iranian debt to the terror victims plaintiffs. Included
in the judgment are all the “top-level domain” (TLD) names provided by ICANN to
Iran, including the .IR TLD, the Persian-language ایران TLD, and all Internet
Protocol (IP) addresses being utilized by the Iranian government and its
agencies.
The
award is based on an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act that US
courts have repeatedly ruled does not apply to Iran.
The only
question is, said Darshan-Leitner, how ICANN plans to satisfy the judgment.
“They have ten days to respond, and unless the court changes its mind, they
will have to forward us fees Iran is supposed to pay to renew its licenses,
with the renewal done annually. They may decide to do that, in which case that
money will go towards satisfying the judgment.”
But
there are other possibilities, Darshan-Leitner said. “ICANN may decide that it
just isn’t worth their while to do business with Iran anymore, because all the
money coming in will go to the terror victims.” In that case, Darshan-Leitner
said, ICANN could “pull the plug” on Iran’s Internet, suspending use of the .ir
domain and disconnecting Iranian IP addresses from the web.
Even if
ICANN decided not to do that, Shurat Hadin could demand an auction of the
Iranian Internet assets, arguing that it could realize more compensation money
that way – meaning that Iran would no longer be in control of its own websites.
“The
payments are just one aspect of the judgment,” Darshan-Leitner said. “It’s the
assets themselves that we were awarded. This is the first time that terror
victims have moved to seize the domain names, IPs and Internet licenses of
terror-sponsoring states like Iran in an attempt to satisfy their court
judgments. The Iranians must be shown that there is a steep price to be paid
for their sponsorship of terrorism. In business and legal terms it is quite
simple — we are owed money, and these assets are currency worth money. We
remain committed to helping these American families satisfy their judgments.”
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