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Trump DOJ goon threatens Wikipedia
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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Say it with me "you have no power over me"
But it does
It can confiscate the domain name and with that, Wikipedia will be gone. People all over the world will have backups, and clones will spawn like there is no tomorrow but there is no federation, so each will do their own independent thing, fracturing mankinds knowledge even more
It depends where the domain is registered. The US can't steal the domain from a German registrar.
And even if the domain name got stolen, they dont need to clone it. Just put it behind a new domain name. It would cause maybe 24 hours of downtime.
MediaWiki is already a global org. Even if all their US staff was arrested and the US servers seized, the rest of the team abroad would still be working.
The US still controls ICANN and with that they can pretty much do with DNS names whatever they want. Steal it from a German registrar? Well yeah, they actually can, what are you going to do to stop that? That is a known issue, actually.
I fully agree that they can switch domains but do not underestimate the importance.of domain names.
Also, they can force Google and Bing to censor Wikipedia completely, not having any links to it anywhere. With that, for most users it won't exist anymore
There is a shit load of things that they can do to really make everyone miserable, this is what you get for giving the US damn near veto powers on Internet issues
None of that is practical
Well that is a shitty argument
Pointing to hypotheticals that have no record of history are shitty arguments