For those who haven’t been following this topic, a couple days ago the US designated Italian anarchist collective Autistici/Inventati as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization. A/I provides free web services such as encrypted email, web hosting, and fediverse hosting for leftist & antifascist individuals and orgs. They’re probably most well known for running the blog hosting platform NoBlogs(dot)org.

As we’ve seen in cases such as those of Francesca Albanese and some ICC judges, US sanctions on individuals and small orgs are devastating in all sorts of ways. From being cut out of the banking & payments system to being banned from most internet platforms, these sanctions make it hard to exist as an individual in society, let alone function as an organization. Any business and org that A/I interacts with - from banks to server providers and domain registrars - now risks secondary sanctions by association, and so most will preemptively comply out of fear. Already A/I has been shut out of their Paypal account, some of their servers, and their bank has given them a notice that they will need to close their accounts to avoid repercussions on all their customers. It’s an existential threat to their activities. This is all in the span of two days, despite the sanctions technically only being effective from September 25th.

Here’s a good writeup on the history of A/I and the current situation. It’s hosted on NoBlogs though, so I don’t know if it will stay up for long. It’s archived on the Wayback Machine, in case.

What I mainly want to focus on here, though, is the domain registration problem. Their domains mostly use the .org TLD, which is managed by the US-based Public Internet Registry (a 501©(3) non-profit corporation based in Virginia). Already yesterday A/I’s domains were briefly unresolvable, although they seem to be back for now. It’s likely that A/I will need to move to another TLD which is more resistant to the US’s pressure, if there even is one.

This is actually the question I want to pose here to our more knowledgeable comrades: are there any safe neutral TLDs, resistant to US censorship? The US controls most generic TLDs, and even some national TLDs on behalf of countries without the resources and know-how to manage their own. Many other TLDs are similarly in control of allied countries like the UK and France, which will probably enforce US censorship if ordered to. I run a few sites under US-based TLDs, so this episode reminded me I need to rethink my choice of domain registration. The broader issue though is that they US controls so many layers of the web stack that just worrying about DNS might be futile. Is it even possible to setup a web hosting / comms stack that is fully independent of US control?