All your .COMs are belong to U.S.

Just to prove the point that ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, and any other of these nefarious laws are not actually required, a Canadian registered .com based gambling site no longer exists because it is in breach of Maryland state laws. I am starting to wonder if I need to rethink my stance on the U.N. having some level of internet governance.... No, that still doesn't sound like a good idea, but this is possibly one of the future references that will be used to support that case. It certainly does help to make Russia's and China's case that the U.S. has too much control over the internet.

Why do I care about a gambling site anyway? I actually don't care about the gambling aspect of it, I think gambling is largely evil and is just as addictive to some as crack cocaine, such that, left unchecked, an addicted gambler ends up in the same predicaments as the chronic cocaine user minus the heart problems... Further proof of this can be seen everywhere as too-big-to-fail banks gambled (and still do) our present and future into oblivion, but the content of the site is neither here nor there in my perception of true the issue at hand: the internet as an American police state.

Leaving aside that this site is dedicated to screwing people out of money, legally or otherwise, this site is owned and operated outside of the U.S. Borders but is now blocked everywhere... In Canada I see this:

That's interesting, but I don't live in your jurisdiction, and I am definitely not in Maryland...

It is likely that everywhere sees this, but feel free to click on the picture as it should open the gambling site if I am wrong (though I doubt I am).

So this would mean, that any .com, .net, .org, .name, .gov, .cc, .tv, .edu, and .jobs top-level domains could suffer the same fate for breaking some state law since the court order only needs to be sent to Verisign in order to be blocked. But we must make certain that this is not confused with ICANN's role as that is what Russia and China appear to be proposing should become U.N. territory... ICANN could and should, however, make this their business since it breaks the core function of the internet. That core being: to be accessible and available. They probably will not do anything however, since the core of the group operates inside U.S. borders...

The worst part of this is that the technology exists to do a reverse-IP lookup and block only visitors originating in Maryland, yet, this site is dark to everyone... While it is true that technologically inclined Maryland gamblers could find ways around such a block, that is still a smaller number than those who would not know where to begin to mask their IP or channel through an IP outside of their state (and don't use this article as a reference on how to do so, I am deliberately not using certain words...).

Don't discount this as 'it's just a gambling site, so who cares?', because it just as easily could be Copyright violations, and will spread to freedom of speech, access to information, and complete media blackout of 'forbidden topics'... And I thought cyber-criminals and online predators made the internet a scary place to live...

-DIrtyKID©