[marshray]

Finally, it is important to realise that this is not a victimless crime. What brought this home to me was a few years back when I overheard a nurse [] excitedly talking about a pair of brand name boots she'd bought on the internet.

"Hardworking baby nurse falls for scam on the internet."

ZOMG That's one of the stupidest justifications for fucking up DNS and censoring the Internet that I've ever heard.

A lot (majority?) of consumers don't realise that for all the brand loyality they might have in respect of Google and Paypal, etc^, they are services that are easily misused by unrelated third parties and so should not be taken as any sort of 'trust mark' in they way that shopping in large well-known department store does.

The nurse controlling your preemie's heart rate monitor is too stupid to know the difference between Google and Nordstrom's.

Oh give me a fucking break.

I had a preemie too. Those nurses are all sharp as tacks. She knew exactly what she was doing.

[craigmc]

Read the comment again dude. Never suggested that this (or similar) judgements are worth it. Also, I asked her, she didn't. Nor do the hundreds of thousands of other people who fall for these scams. Fact is though, unless the tech companies that are de facto facilitating these scams don't become better at preventing them, these judgements (and the sort of scary legislation that get proposed to deal with it) will become more common.

[marshray]

I asked her, she didn't.

If the cheaper one has nearly all the same physical properties and a vastly better price, she didn't care very much if it was a "genuine" article. Nurses are very utilitarian.

Now you can believe that is a good way or a bad way to think, but it's not a problem that's going to be significantly improved by having the legal system DNS-jacking .com and trying to censor the internet.

tech companies that are de facto facilitating these scams

As if there were no scams before the "tech companies" came along to facilitate them.

Yes, there probably are businesses and business models that are threatened by a post-information-scarcity world. But whole societies are threatened by censorship.

But, more immediately and directly, the security of critical infrastructure like DNS (and our networks that depend on it) is threatened by these attempts to kink around with it.