The whole controversy began with the U.S. pursuit of Bodog.com, which is run by Canadians and registered in Canada.

It’s an online betting site, which is illegal in the US, meaning that they cannot take bets from or make pay-offs to US citizens.

But they were indicted for doing just this, and the US initiated proceedings to shut them down. One would assume that the US would go to the Canucks to ask them to get the Canadian registrar to shut down the site.

But the US took a shortcut and went straight to Verisign, which has the contract from ICANN to manage the .com and other generic top-level domains (gTLD). Verisign complied with the US “request” and changed the Name Server records for Bodog.com so that the site now redirects to a takedown page, instead of the server hosting the pages put up by the owners.

Wired.com looked into this subject in a little more detail to see if this was standard operating procedure in such cases, and it turns out that the official position – as stated to Wired.com by a US customs enforcement spokeswoman, is that the US reserves the right to seize or shit down any .com, .net and .org domain name if it is in violation of US law, regardless of the law in the country where the site is registered.

Way it works when they want to shut down a site is that the US usually serves court orders to Verisign, which manages .com, .net, .cc, .tv and .name, and to the Public Interest Registry, which manages .org domains. Both are based on US soil in Virginia, and so is ICANN, which is based in Marina del Rey, California.

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