“I am concerned that the people behind Autistici/Inventati could be harassed, or their life made difficult on an individual level, by the Trump administration. The absence of any reply from Italy or the European Union, who should fight against unlawful restriction of their citizens’ freedom, is baffling. I stand in solidarity with Autistici/inventati”. Speaking to Il Fatto Quotidiano is one of the leading international figures in the field of digital rights. His name is Benjamin Sonntag-King, a French computer engineer who has been working for over twenty years to promote the internet as a tool for liberation. Our newspaper has interviewed him.
Autistici/Inventati (A/I) relied on the ‘.org’ domain which is controlled by PIR, i.e. the Public Interest Registry organisation based in Virginia, in the United States. Not even 48 hours after the Trump administration designated A/I as a terrorist organisation, PIR shut down A/I’s domain. Is this a confirmation that collectives which do not agree with Trump’s policies on wars, migrants and civil rights should stay away from the .org domain, as they are within the reach of the U.S. authorities?
The domain name of Austici/Inventati is only one face of the problem: if you step back a bit, any kind of US-controlled Internet service is politically dangerous to use nowadays, not only the ‘.org’ domains. Any domain name root like ‘.com’ or ‘.info’ could have the same issue, since they are managed by US organisations too. And not only domain names: using Google ads, buying service from Microsoft or Adobe, put you at great risk of losing all your data and services if one morning Trump gets up on the wrong side of the bed and then heard about your organisation…That’s a risk that any company or organisation should think about, and fast. I’m quite worried that the EU is not taking a stance on forcing EU companies to not comply with US sanctions if there is no EU equivalent sanction decided. The EU should understand that the instability of US policy is a big issue.
