A company’s assets include its Internet address, or domain name. Under the Pro-IP Act, the government can seize that domain name from organizations that violate copyrights as long as the online address ends in .com, .org, or .net. Those addresses are issued by a registry based in the United States and are subject to US law.
The Justice Department used “an authority that was [originally] intended for seizing a drug dealer’s cars as a method for shutting down an entire website,’’ said Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.
Sanchez said the same power could be used against other major websites implicated in allegations of data piracy. One potential example: the Swedish site thepiratebay.org, which offers users links for downloading illicit content, and which has a US-registered domain name.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said the agency would not comment on any pending investigations.
Although the Pro-IP Act was a major expansion of the government’s power to regulate the Internet, opposition was muted at the time it was passed.
“I think there was generally just less attention to these issues of Internet freedom,’’ Sanchez said.
He said he believes it would be a different story if the law were put up for a vote today. One reason is the fallout from last year’s “Arab Spring’’ protests. Reports that embattled Middle Eastern regimes tried to cut off Internet access within their countries alarmed Americans who wouldn’t want their own government to have such power.
“The public was much more sensitized by all of these events,’’ Sanchez said.
Another factor, said Sanchez, was the rise of social networking services like Twitter and Facebook, which are used by twice as many Americans now than in 2008, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The social networks made it much easier to quickly organize opposition to additional Internet regulations, Sanchez said.
