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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

While there are more important things in life (like being accused wrongly of child pornography), I wonder how that effects their Google rankings to suddenly have your entire domain ripped out from underneath you and pointing to a duplicate content site.

My educated guess based on experience working with people affected by dissimilar causes but similar appearance to Google: a massive hit to rankings/traffic within about 48 hours, and recovery to a fraction of normal several weeks later.

I doubt that one can easily convince a judge that loss of Google rankings is a cognizable harm under tort law, but given that an agency of the US government just called you a child pornographer on your own property, if there isn't a sovereign immunity defense you will hardly need to justify what a high ranking on Google is worth to receive damages.

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The problem seems to be (for lack of better information) that sites are shut down pre-emptively with no warning.

I'm all for prosecuting child pornographers, and shutting down their content as quickly as possible - but that should be possible by a court order against the hosting provider.... or if said provider is unreachable / out of jurisdiction, and has STILL had some reasonable attempt at contact to press charges, then sure, go after the domain - but there needs to be some due process behind things rather than just having the federal authorities and DNS layer just whomping things down with little to no oversight.

Well that's just the thing - if someone is unambiguously a child pornographer - throw their ass in jail!

WTF are they doing screwing around with DNS registrations in cases where they know that is taking place?

It sure seems to me like some adversarial government entity simply found a knob they can turn to screw with people when they don't actually have the standard of evidence required for a prosecution.

> The problem seems to be (for lack of better information) that sites are shut down pre-emptively with no warning.

Well, you can thank the Patriot Act for that. It allows them to go after people without telling them until it happens.

I doubt that one can easily convince a judge that loss of Google rankings is a cognizable harm under tort law

Considering how many sites have analytics these days, being able to show a strong correlation between a big blow to your traffic and a decline in revenue would (I think, IANAL) be very good evidence. Instead of asking the judge to imagine the possible ramifications, you'd be presenting solid data whose admissibility the judge could make a quick decision about.

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