> The objection is not that the order is lawless, but that the .com registry on American soil hands American courts a switch for the whole internet, and a Travis County judge has now thrown it.

> [...] American infrastructure, with its supposed First Amendment protections, are of no use here when a Texas judge can order a site taken down for hosting legal content, because it did not introduce digital ID features.

Does this mean almost everybody has to arrange alternate domain names now (under alternate DNS jurisdictions) to avoid their online presence being totally destroyed by the whim of any US state—even ones they don't even do business in?

This isn't how things are supposed to work, dangit...

I've always been bothered by the level of centralization that the DNS system brings to the internet. I agree that it shouldn't be possible in principle for a random court in Texas to shut down a foreign website; but insofar as the .com domain name is in fact run by a US company and US courts can issue orders to US companies, any institution anywhere in the world that relies on a .com domain as its authoritative name is making itself de-facto subject to any US court.

There are alternative DNS roots, various projects to encode human-meaningful names in blockchains like ENS - all of which have the problem that no one actually uses them; standard DNS has all the network effect.

Losing their .com is probably the least of their worries, there are plenty of shady TLDs to pick from. Their headquarters in NL got raided and servers seized last month.