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Discussion (133 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
.com in particular has also been well proven over the past 5 to 10 years to be vulnerable to federal court orders to seize domains at the registrar level. That's not really anything new. It's a known risk for anyone building a corporate brand/identity around a specific .com domain name. What's new is this is being done from the state court level. (Edit: To be clear, in my opinion, a US State court completely lacks jurisdiction on this matter).
Two things of note regarding this.
First, note the office of origin: Texas Attorney General, which is currently occupied by Ken Paxton who is running for a tightly contested seat in the US Senate.
Second, a state court does not have jurisdiction beyond its borders for entities not operating within same.
> .com in particular has also been well proven over the past 5 to 10 years to be vulnerable to federal court orders to seize domains at the registrar level. ... What's new is this is being done from the state court level.
Which is why any attempt to enforce this ruling would be subject to removal to Federal court.
If I were running a business that had any operations or clients whatsoever in Europe my opinion on this topic would be different (in terms of legal liability to the corporation, and necessity of compliance to ensure ongoing revenue from European customers, etc), but I am not.
I fail to see the difference in principle from the federal government doing this for copyright violations.
GDPR Article 17 expressly requires the removal of things from the global internet
> You're free to not serve your site in the EU
Geoblocking is functionally impossible
Not sure how this does not violate interstate commerce.
Contact your congress criter: https://www.congress.gov/
BTW: Kick - Melborne, AU. US Operations: SanFran CA. Registar: Verisign - Reston, VA.
Or did you mean, like, morally?
Doing this at the state court level is as nonsensical as an individual state deciding it doesn't like a law or regulation that's part of the jurisdiction of the FAA or FCC, and wants to do its own unique weird local thing.
I’m Canadian and Texas courts have zero authority over me so they can f*ck off.
I don’t agree with the premise of age verification, but of course a prosecutor would go after the assets they can reach if enforcing local laws. They’ve done this for years when it comes to copyright infringement.
There exists a well defined process, precedent and prior case law in US federal court to seize a .COM domain name by a court order issued to VeriSign. Doing this at the state level is entirely new.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/08/europe/porn-site-motherless-t...
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/man-behind-xxx-domains-say...
1. Instigate a completely impractical, rights-violating scheme for age verification that nobody in their right mind wants to implement.
2. Then, enforce it against whatever porn sites land in your jurisdiction at all, knowing that they, like everyone else, don't do the verification.
Am I close?
Suppose the porn site tries to implement it. How many people are going to hand over their personal info to a shady porn site? Most visitors are there anonymously for whatever free stuff they can watch.
Either way, the porn site is ... screwed. Implement age verification: 99% visitors now back-button out and find another porn site. Don't implement it: blocked or shut down.
https://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg?si=AL91MHC5q5yg2jnA
This is going to be a real problem when states start nuking whole parts of the internet from orbit. A state has a law against conversion therapy and starts to remove sites with that? A state has a law against trans people? Or abortion? Or medical misinformation? Suddenly we just start purging sites back and forth?
Battlegrounds end up as torn up, muddy, desolate places. Turning the domain registry into a battleground is a bad idea. Over the long term, no one wins if we choose to fight there.
But what people do instead is to disable access for people from that specific state.
If someone from the US does something illegal on your site (which is legal in your country), depending on how much they want you will end up in a US prison.
Before the US decided that betting online was OK, betting sites had travel advisories for their employees not to travel to the US.
Multiple conservative SCOTUS justices openly admit to taking bribes from parties with cases before them.
https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-blocked-states-2025
Pornhub itself is doing the blocking; it uses geolocation and denies services to IP addresses from jurisdictions with age verification laws. The laws are usually not structured so as to require a third party such as an ISP to block noncompliant sites; instead, the governments of the states with those laws can sue the porn sites and their service providers (Verisign in the case of .com domains).
>Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead
> Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to www.texasattorneygeneral.gov. If you visit this site, attackers could try to steal information like your passwords, emails, or credit card details.
Otherwise the general idea seems absurd that an individual state could freeze a domain impacting for the whole Internet…
(EDIT: I won’t lose any sleep at the loss of such scum but the general principle seems a bit strange.)
So they're using the fact that Verisign is a US company and can therefore be leaned on.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. What do other countries do who don't have Verisign to lean on? US companies really don't like being told what to do by governments of other countries, but when the shoe is on the other foot...
They lean on their ISPs, see Spain and the La Liga controversy.
This appears to basically wipe the site from the entire internet, for all countries.
This result means that Texas can take various means to block motherless. But more importantly no motherless employees should travel to Texas without risk of arrest. Same for abc/youtube/facebook employess traveling to India.
You should be aware of this and monitor it in your industry.
You know real, friendly, generous humans live in Texas, right?
And Kick Online Entertainment S.A. appears to be incorporated in Luxembourg. The "S.A." is a mostly European thing, kind of like a "limited" company.
That's generally key in making a precedent. The first case is someone nobody really cares for, but it's built a precedent where the next case must follow suit.
(Under "Controversies".)
> In March 2012, the U.S. government declared that it has the right to seize domains ending in .com, .net, .cc, .tv, .name, and .org if the companies administering the domains are based in the U.S. The U.S. government can seize the domains ending in .com, .net, .cc, .tv, and .name by serving a court-order on Verisign, which manages those domains.
However, applying this for violations of _state_ law seems odd.
Where does it end?
What if a law enacted by a single US city’s city council is violated? Would US as a country seize the domain?
"Sorry Meta, but BFE, Nebraska outlawed Farmville and now some guy named Bob owns facebook.com."
The US court system really needs to do something about this, and overturn Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton in favour of Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union.
Thank you for your virtue signaling. You're now registered as a lifetime GOP member.
> Kick Online, which openly describes itself as a “moral free” company, ignored the lawsuit and refused to comply with the court’s order. It continued publishing and distributing harmful sexual material that was accessible to minors in Texas.
This is the same website with a forum with millions of users trading information on how to assault their partner.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2026/03/world/expose-rape-as...
FAFO.
What do you mean "serves"? Does that just mean not actively blocking users from Texas? Allowing your web site to be accessible regardless of user location is, and always has been, the default way to run a web site. Your assertion would mean that web site operators are beholden to the laws of all jurisdictions on the planet if they don't actively block those users.
Think about what a bad precedent that would be. Some countries criminalize promotion of pro-LGBT+ content. What if those countries suddenly demand extradition of people who run pro-LGBT+ blogs because the web sites are available there?
Also, keep in mind that geolocation isn't actually part of the Internet - it's an overlay that private companies have cobbled together that usually works. But it's not perfect, especially at the subnational level. Many times I've connected to public Wi-Fi and I get an alert that I've signed into something from across the country, because that's where the Wi-Fi provider's IPs are located. Are you sure that every jurisdiction in the world will accept that if gelocation gets it wrong, you're off the hook? Utah has already claimed that companies are responsible for complying with their laws even if the user masks their location with VPN. https://www.privacyguides.org/news/2026/05/11/utah-targets-v...
Does this mean Texas can shutdown other websites in other states that provide abortion support? I’m sure there are those who would argue such to be harmful to children…(not to mention the fetus)
Leftists and trans activists attempting to shut down Kiwifarms comes to mind.
Supreme Court allows Texas to enforce law requiring age verification and parental consent on apps - https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/07/supreme-court-allows-texa... - July 6th, 2026
Supreme Court allows Texas’ law on age-verification for pornography sites - https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/06/court-allows-texas-law-on... - June 27th, 2025
https://mashable.com/article/all-the-states-and-countries-wi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...
I didn't know that Texas is supporting and promoting the North Korean government: http://naenara.com.kp/main/index/en/first
I wonder why they aren't being called out for anti-American terrorist groups.
Everyone learns this the hard way, it seems.
Then it's violating the laws of a whole lot of places by serving pornography to adults.
The existence of a web server doesn't feel like enough nexus to seize a domain.
Nonsense.
There is no reliable way to not serve your content to people in Texas. If anything, Texas should compel ISPs to not serve it to their Texas customers.
This is exactly how we lose all our rights.
Found the case, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/07...
The Ninth Circuit held that the U.S. court had jurisdiction to proceed because VeriSign—the registry for all .com domains—was located in the United States.
I want to see other countries start rejecting the ICANN root and forcing all the US domains under .us, but it will never happen. It would break their vhosts for one thing. Doing it at the browser level could avoid that.