On Wednesday February 15th, 2011 JotForm.com had its domain name removed from the Internet by its hosting company, GoDaddy. It appears that site came down at the request of the U.S. Secret Service, possibly due to a form on the site being used in connection with a phishing scam that one of its users was using the form for. Instead of contacting JotForm and asking for the offending form to be removed, the Secret Service had the whole site removed from DNS, and in the process also blocked millions of non-offending forms.
This is the type of behavior that caused millions of people to protest the proposed SOPA and PIPA bills. While those bills dealt with intellectual property protection, and not fraud, the remedies would have been the same. In the wake of the MegaUpload shutdown, it appears that the U.S. government is more than capable of using current laws to deal with Internet based crimes. However, just because the government has the power it does not mean that they should be pulling whole sites from the Internet over alleged illegal actions by their users.
JotForm is a startup company competing against companies like Google in a battle for users. For a company like this, being taken offline for any period of time, let alone for a whole day, could mean the loss of a competitive edge. Looking beyond the harm caused to JotForm, any startup company that bases its product around user created content may think twice about hosting or working within the United States. Going forward the government should move very carefully when they ask a hosting service to remove a domain from DNS. Most companies would work with the government to remove offending content and find individuals running schemes using the service. If the government wants to promote innovation, taking websites offline is not the best way to do so.
It will be interesting to see how law enforcement reacts to user created content as the business community continues to rely on their users for content, and Congress continues to graple with these new realities.