I will be first in line to remove Judge Thomas Wingate's stripes, rip off his epaulettes and break his sword. What a ludicrous decision. The man obviously does not live in the real world and should be suitably admonished.

I wonder how many of these actually went offline (or went offline for more than a few minutes). I mean,, how many registrars are actually in Kentucky? In a few other cases, I thought I had read the registrar just cahnged the IP to point to some "UR site has been seized!!!" page, but since the registration was still in the owner's name they just moved it to another registrar and set it back up properly 8-).

Anyway, good that cluefulness prevailed. A domain is obviously not a gambling device.

...that someone, SOMEWHERE has some common damn sense about things on the internet. I agree with David's assessment of Wingate, that man needs to have the boots put to him, medium-style.

And whoever at ICANN approved this needs to be yanked. Seriously, isn't ICANN an international organization? They may be incorporated by US law. And doesn't this action violate their bylaws as seen here: http://www.icann.org/en/about/ ?

...that some self-righteous, puffed-up windbag in some podunk state felt that he had the authority to prevent the casino owners from conducting their lawful business outside their borders.

If online gambling is illegal in a given state, then that state's judiciary has a variety of options open to it which don't involve exceeding their authority, or affecting those outside their jurisdiction.

For one, did they even ask the gambling sites' owners whether they wouldn't mind blocking Kentuckian IP addresses?

I doubt China or anywhere other than the US could do this.

Just like how they can control or withdraw the GPS signals should they wish, i'm sure they still control the foundations of the DNS root system, as this case shows.

I think you are missing the point. The ownership of the domains was changed. At that point, the original owners would have been unable to modify any of the DNS configuration that the new owner specified. For ownership to change back requires intervention by the applicable TLD management organisation.

I agree that the domains were probably only down as long as it took for the respective companies to purchase new names and set the DNS records. Bearing in mind that a DNS change can take up to 24 hours to propagate, an on the ball administrator could have had the new domains set up quickly enough that the site would have been available on some domain all the time. Add a mail-out to all your current users with the new URL and you're sorted.