Hosting & Terrorism on the Internet

The US government approached one of the largest domain registrars in the industry, eNom, to deal with the issue that domains can very easily be repointed at a moments notice. eNom, like other large registrars, maintain a set of DNS servers for the purpose of providing a quick and convenient mechanism from moving domains from ip address to ip address very quickly and conveniently. Changes on these DNS servers happen instantly instead of taking as much as 72 hours to propagate. This is great for consumers but a bit of an issue in fighting terroristic organizations.

In the eNom case, the domains in question were for the primary Hezbollah group in Lebanon and their sympathetic counterparts. The organization was able to maintain uptime on the domain by utilizing multiple providers and cycling through them as providers took content down. These end providers had no part in the sale of the domain but could be guilty of hosting the content. In this case, the authorities decided not to pursue the server providers but that did not mean that laws were not broken.