Christopher Wolfe's blog
April 7, 2015
Iceland’s domain registry suspends website without court order
Back in 2010 Iceland’s domain registry, ISNIC, refused to close Wikileaks’ Icelandic domain “wikileaks.is” despite pressure from the US government. ISNIC declared that “only Icelandic authorities, armed with a court order, can order ISNIC to delete or close down a particular .is-domain. This has, as said before, never happened.”
This is no longer true. On October 14th, ISNIC suspended for the first time two domains because of their content. It did so without a court order. The domains, khilafah.is and khilafa.is hosted media produced for the Islamic State. They were registered by Azym Abdullah to an address in New Zealand.
Khilafah.is wasn’t an official Islamic State website, according to Abdullah. He created the website to provide “an alternative narrative” to the events in Iraq and Syria. Khilafah.is first went online in early October 2014. By October 10th it had spread throughout the jihadi community on twitter. Khilafah.is hosted a large archive of news releases and other media produced for the Islamic State, including the first four issues of [Dabiq magazine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabiq_(magazine) and the speeches of Caliph Ibrahim. Khilafah.is also requested donations to a bitcoin address which has not yet received any bitcoin.
By the evening of October 10th 2014, an Icelandic member of parliament mentioned khilafah.is on Twitter. The next morning, the Icelandic press covered the site and a few hours later Icelandic government officials started looking for a way to shut the site down. Abdullah moved khalifah.is’ content from servers in Iceland to Latvia then to the USA and finally to Sweden.
On October 12th, ISNIC announced the suspension of khilafah.is and khilafa.is. ISNIC justified the suspension because the websites’ content was not “within the limits of Icelandic law” according to ISNIC’s board. No Icelandic court had ruled on whether or not the content of these websites was illegal. The decision to seize Azym Abdullah’s domains was made by the five board members of ISNIC, which is a private company.
Abdullah says the only communication he received from ISNIC was an automated message saying that his domains had been suspended because his registration information was incorrect or incomplete. He suspects that the Icelandic foreign ministry pressured ISNIC to close his domains.
ISNIC had maintained a reputation for defending free expression. Its news page contains a series of announcements criticising the suspension of domains. ISNIC argued in May 2014 that you should register a .is domain because Iceland “is known for respecting human rights.” It is now clear that ISNIC will not defend free speech.
ISNIC’s decision to subvert free speech was encapsulated in a change they made to their FAQ. The answer to “Under what circumstances would ISNIC close or delete a .is domain?” was recently expanded to include “a decision by the ISNIC board”. This now means that if an .is website offends the moral sensibilities of ISNIC’s five board members, it might be seized.
Jens Jensen, the head of ISNIC, insisted that the government did not exert direct pressure on him to suspend the domains. Iceland’s Prime Minster, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, supported the suspension, saying “this has nothing to do with freedom of expression, but criminal and monstrous conduct. We have to be able to shut that down.”
The story was covered extensively by Morgunblaðið, Iceland’s largest newspaper. However, the Washington Post was the only english-language newspaper to print a story about the suspension. The Voice of America and Al Arabiya both published articles with predictable bias.
The next day Wikileaks once again involved itself in a debate on free speech in Iceland. It posted a few tweets criticizing the suspension:
We denounce Iceland’s shutdown of ‘Islamic State’ news. Everyone has the right to see and judge the arguments of IS. If Iceland wants to charge someone for attempted murder it can do that. It has not. It has closed a publisher and reduced knowledge.