A full-time Canadian politician by the name of Joe Volpe is involved with a campaign donation scandal. So someone put up a site parodying his involvement. He didn’t like it so his staff quickly had the site suspended and taken off line. My question: Isn’t there any legal process in Canada for this type of problem? Don’t you guys have laws or courts, or do politicians rule with complete authority? Just wondering.
I’m Joe Volpe and I do not approve of this message!
Overnight, someone built a website spoofing Liberal leadership candidate Joe Volpe and his acceptance of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from children, including the 11-year-old twins of a former vice-president of a generic drug company.
By early yesterday afternoon, the Volpe team had the website pulled down.
Mr. Volpe’s campaign had the site shut down without knowing, it seems, who put it up: “Hi Everyone,” wrote Brenden Johnstone, who is with the Volpe campaign, in an e-mail to other leadership campaigns. “There has been concern about how the issue of the Volpe donations was reflecting on the leadership race.
“My Office has had the website suspended through CIRA [Canadian Internet Registration Authority] and CDNS [Canadian Domain Name Services] and it will be down as soon as 6 p.m. I think the issue with the website has been dealt with. . . .”
Actually, I think in this case the person attempting to get the site shut down doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing.
While the owner of the no-libs.com domain is Canadian, the CIRA only deals with the .ca ccTLD, and CDNS has nothing to do with the domain, as far as I can see, unless Sibername (registar of record) has something to do with them.
The proper people to try and get to close down the site would be ixwebhosting. Who actually provide hosting, which means they actually have something to do with all this.
“Do Canadians have any due process or free speech rights?”
Do we?
The web site seems up and alive to me. What’s the issue then?
Yah the problem in question was that they looked at the .ca TLD and the registration was to a Mike Hunt or something along those lines. So when asked to verify if he is a canadian ( required by the CIRA that the domain owner be a canadian resident) they could not as probably the name was bogus. The registrar now has no choice but to cancel the .ca domain.
Link saying this is here
The issue is not wheather it should have been done but rather if he has the write to now who is doing it. Which i think he does.
I have no love for Joe Volpe, but his campaign did not pull the plug on the site. They requested information about who the domain holder was.
The information on the domain holder was a false name – “Mike Hunt” 😛 The CRIA rules mandated that the site is shut down due to this fraudulent behaviour.
“I have no love for Joe Volpe, but his campaign did not pull the plug on the site.”
So he was lying when he said, “My Office has had the website suspended…”
SN:
Yes. Par for the course with politicians. Prostitutes have more integrity than these bastards!
I’m not sure about the connection between prostitutes and integrity.
Now if you had said Used Car Salesmen your comment would have seemed more relavent.
No, this is a VERY big issue here now. Just as big as it would be in the U.S. Stephen Colbert was hailed as a hero for his lampoon of Bush last month. Joe Volpe is perceived as a loser. The debate over who can “pull the plug” on an account and how it’s done is now under scrutiny. Can an Internet company suspend an account under an “agreement violation”? Ask YouTube.
This isn’t just Canadian.
http://www.pacificit.ca/article/134
The site is still up in the .com area. This is more of an issue with his office lying about it being down when it is not. It is however removed from dot ca because it would appear the poster wanted to remain hidden.
To me the difference between this and Stephen Colbert as posted above is that this person does not disclose who he is. What ever the person reasons, when they choice to remain hidden it becomes and issues with his TLD rules.
If Mike Hunt isn’t permitted to put up a website, then they should make all those others take theirs down.
This is they country that has all these human rights commissions trying to arrest people for what they say.
The site is now back up (… interesting). The registrar (CIRA) has “updated” the ownership of domain. Though the issue has settled down (and the leadership candidate is still in the running), there still are a lot of questions to be answered….