| HN Mirror

Your second point makes it seem like there are so many laws that you have to be aware of to avoid getting your domain seized by the US.

Well yes, but in principle that's exactly right. Really think about this: in principle you need to know the entire legal code of the US and all of the ways that someone in the US might use your site to try to break that legal code, before you know whether you're safe. If you start operating the next version of CraigsList and people in the US start using it to sell fish which were caught in violation of U.S. law, it doesn't matter whether you realized it was happening at the time, whether those fish are legal in your country, or any such thing; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could get a prosecutor to convince a judge to issue a takedown warrant for your domain.

What's that, you say? You just run a tasks-and-dates management web app? You'll ban users from the U.S. from logging in? That's not necessarily going to help. If your service gets used by some radical Muslims in some country that the U.S. happens to be bombing, they might take you down. Given the tempting targets, I guess you'd best be banning Iran from logging in, just in case the elite there find your app useful.

Bottom line is, in this case it's quite possible that the gambling enterprise that they were running was perfectly legal in their home country and happened to be illegal in one state in the U.S. -- and people in the U.S. were using it for its intended purpose illegally. So in the bigger picture, if you really think about it, the fact that you're not catching the US government's attention yet is no defense: in principle you need to know all of the things which are illegal in the U.S., and how users both inside and outside of the U.S. might use your site to do those things. Otherwise, you'd better move off of .com, to some domains run by a government which doesn't routinely steal them.