Have you been following the story about Sacha Baron Cohen? Cohen is a comedian who frequently makes fun of Kazakhstan (mostly for its politics). He has (had) a site on Kazakhstan’s country code, .kz, that made fun of the country and its backward government.
Kazakhstan decided to block the site. Their official reason was that the domain violated the .kz requirements including keeping two servers in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan also claimed that the site was registered using false contact data. But the country came out to say this was only the official cause, not the reason:
“We’ve done this so he can’t badmouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name,” Nurlan Isin, President of the Association of Kazakh IT Companies, told Reuters. “He can go and do whatever he wants at other domains.”
This is like a US citizen registering BadTradePolicy.us and the US government shutting it down, requiring the owner to use a different domain extension. There’s no way around it — it’s censorship.
This is just another example of why we should not allow management of the domain name system and internet to fall into international hands. Say what you want about US policy, but at least free speech is allowed.
The US has conceded that countries should be able to exert control over their country code domains, but if Kazakhstan had a say in the internet at large they might push to ban this site on all domain extensions.
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