Canadian registrar EasyDNS said it has changed its take-down policy. Until recently, the company was quite liberal on the issue and even had an ongoing beef with the UK police over their repeated requests for file-sharing and counterfeiting-related domains to be taken down without judicial review. The registrar harshly turned down Canada’s National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which demanded that EasyDNS take down unlicensed pharmacy websites without court orders. In January, CEO Mark Jeftovic referred to the association officials as a “batch of clowns.”
The company made a U-turn on its policies after a tragic incident. A customer of one of its registrants died of an overdose, using a “controlled substance” ordered online. The web site in question used a domain registered via EasyDNS which obviously did not have a proper license, as Jeftovic admitted in his blog post. He said that although his company still advocates Internet freedoms, it was not prepared to risk the lives of users due to irresponsible registrants who create web resources for distributing drugs. From now on, he said, EasyDNS will turn off any domain used for a pharmacy web site unless the registrant can produce a license permitting it to sell pharmaceuticals in the territories it sells to.
