By Kurt Seifried (kurt@seifried.org)

Services such as web sites, email and online e-commerce literally cannot exist without DNS infrastructure. As such most companies have invested in a domain name or names, often through large and reputable domain name sellers such as Network Solutions or Neustar Ultra Services. What you may not realize is that by purchasing domain name services and registration from a company in a foreign country you may become liable for any actions that are in contravention of that countries laws.

Now it is highly unlikely that situations such as “Their DNS is hosted in Country X, so they are culpable of a crime in Country X, and once we extradite you to Country X we will put you on trial and then into jail” will occur it is quite possible that Country X will contact the DNS registrar and have your domain name suspended or otherwise rendered unavailable. Just such a situation occurred with panix.com, one of New York city’s oldest ISPs [1]. Although the domain name was not suspended by a law enforcement agency it was hijacked by another entity. As well this was done prior to a weekend, and the DNS registrar that the domain was transferred to was unavailable largely. Thus email to subscribers at panix, web access and so on was heavily impacted, and a significant interruption was experienced. Fortunately panix was able to rectify the situation within a few days, however in the situation of law enforcement taking a domain name the situation might drag on for weeks, months or even years.

So what can be done to avoid such a situation? The first step is to identify where your DNS registrar is actually located. Tools such as “whois” will identify with which registrar a domain name is registered. For example a popular registrar in Canada is Tucows Inc., whose corporate web address is at www.tucowsinc.com. On the corporate contact page the primary address to Tucows is listed as being located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Depending on the size of registrar used this process may be simple or difficult, as a general rule the smaller the registrar the harder it will be to actually pin them down to a physical location. Some small registrars are in fact almost completely virtual; with almost no physical presence.

Once you have identified where your registrar is located you need to decide whether or not that is an acceptable country, in my case I live in Canada so being held to Canadian laws isn’t really a problem. However if you wanted to register your DNS name under a flag of convenience as it were you would need to find a registrar in a different country.

With the number of registrars available now it is possible to use virtually any coountry, of course the primary aspects to be aware of will be the current laws of the country in question, the direction its laws are headed in, and the state of extradition treaties with the country you are in.

[1] http://www.panix.com/hijack-faq.html