Kaput
KAPUT....Adam Liptak has a story worth reading in the New York Times today. Here's how it starts:
Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government.So that's that. Register your domain name through a U.S. company and your business goes kaput if the U.S. Treasury Department decides it doesn't like you. It doesn't matter if you're based in Spain, your servers are in the Bahamas, your customers are mostly European, and you've broken no laws. No warning. Just kaput..... "I came to work in the morning, and we had no reservations at all," Mr. Marshall said on the phone from the Canary Islands. "We thought it was a technical problem."
It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall's Web sites had been put on a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.
Solution: make sure your business has as little connection to the U.S. as you possibly can. It's just not worth the potential hassle. I'm sure the rest of the world is getting this message loud and clear.