Bad host: cutting off Iranian dissidents.DURING THE Super Bowl, Fox aired a commercial for the Arizona-based Web hosting Making a Web site available on the Internet. Many ISPs host a few personal Web pages for an individual at no additional cost above the monthly service fee, but the address is subordinate to the ISP; for example, www.friendlyisp.com/pat_smith. company GoDaddy.com that showed a large-breasted young woman experiencing a wardrobe malfunction Wardrobe malfunction is an euphemism used to describe the accidental exposure of an intimate part or parts of the body due to a defect in an article or articles of clothing. before a titillated tit·il·late v. tit·il·lat·ed, tit·il·lat·ing, tit·il·lates v.tr. 1. To stimulate by touching lightly; tickle. 2. To excite (another) pleasurably, superficially or erotically. Congress. The ad outraged the National Football League, which convinced Fox to cancel a second planned airing. GoDaddy CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. Bob Parsons Bob (Robert) Parsons (born 1950) is the CEO and founder of domain registrar and web host Go Daddy which owns registrars Wild West Domains and Blue Razor Domains, the domain privacy company Domains by Proxy, and the registration authority Starfield Technologies. cried censorship. Meanwhile, his company was helping to prevent Iranian dissidents from even reading about the outside world. According to GoDaddy's Web site, the company is actively "blocking people" in Iran, Cuba, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria "from accessing its site" because of "U.S. government policies." It's not alone. In January the Dallas-based hosting company The Planet abruptly canceled its contracts with the Iranian Students News Agency, which is government-run but has nevertheless provided some sympathetic coverage of the country's reform movement, and with at least two other individual Iranian weblogs. When a blogger named Omid asked for specific reasons why, the company (which has refused all interview requests) responded, "Unfortunately, this is all the information I can give you." So does Washington forbid American companies from hosting Iranian sites? Unless the companies obtain a government license, yes. The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is an agency of the United States Department of the Treasury under the auspices of the Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. OFAC administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on U. issued a June 2003 ruling that hosting Iranian Web sites violates the Trading With the Enemy Act The Trading with the Enemy Act, sometimes abbreviated as TWEA, is a United States federal law, , was enacted in 1917 to restrict trade with countries hostile to the United States. The law gives the President the power to oversee or restrict any and all trade between the U.S. unless companies prove that "the main purpose is to benefit the people of Iran through increased access to reformation." As with the office's other speech-restricting decisions, some American companies choose to avoid the hassle altogether and end up punishing the very dissidents the regulators claim to defend. To explain why Iranians and even nonembargoed Libyans are blocked from accessing GoDaddy's sites, the company's site directs readers to the State Department's "Overview of State-Sponsored Terrorism"--from April 2001. In it, the State Department warns that "terrorists have seized upon the worldwide practice of using information technology ... in daily life." But it's the daily lives of thousands of Iranian bloggers, dozens of whom have been jailed by the mullahs for writing freely, that may suffer. |
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