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back to article Kentucky reverses 141-site net casino land grab

Kentucky officials must return 141 gambling domain names they seized last year in a bid to block internet betting within state borders, an appeals court panel ordered on Tuesday. The 2-1 decision by Kentucky's Court of Appeals reverses a lower-court ruling giving state officials the authority to seize some of the world's most …

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  1. David

    Judge Thomas Wingate

    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.

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  2. Henry Wertz Gold badge

    I wonder how many of these went offline?

    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.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Perhaps Jen could show them the Internet

    You know, the little black box with the red light.

    THEN, they might understand!

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  4. David Eddleman

    Good to see

    ...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/ ?

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    the damge is already done

    any website that think it is/might be breaking the law of any of the US of A states and still have its domain registration in the US of A. Then they deserve whatever problem they might get in the future.

    for now, and since it have been proven that the seizure was erroneous, is the state going to pay, the owners of the domain, for the amount of money they (unjustifiably) lost since last year?

    for all it's worth, I am still no happy about how the judgment was overturned. It wasn't because the seizure was illegal, it was because of the wording of the law. So if the wording is changed*, does that mean they will seize the domains again?

    * reminder, this is the US of A, they can invade 2 countries and call it "liberation." There is no reason the believe they won't change the law for the fun of it.

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'm still amazed...

    ...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?

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  7. Joe K

    Backdoors

    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.

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  8. Ru
    Unhappy

    "Victory for civil-liberties advocates"? I don't think so.

    The appeals court ruled simply that domains are not gambling devices. The rights of Kentucky to dictate to the internet are not mentioned; only their rights to seizure. There is nothing to stop this same situation occurring again in the future with the domains seized under a different law.

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  9. Gulfie

    @Henry Wertz

    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.

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    hmmmm

    you know what... according to the law, it is alright to open a _local_ gambling website in Kentucky... oh well, I guess they are going to close the loophole in the law and try again.

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  11. Walter Francis
    Flame

    How much did this cost Kentucky?

    I've been looking around, I'm curious how much this cost Kentucky. They're already cutting around $300 million out of the budget which includes teachers, KTIP training, etc.. Yet he's pissing away money on this stuff.

    What a joker.

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