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VOTEAUCTION SATIRE ILLEGALLY SQUELCHED by RTMark.com 4:13pm Mon Nov 6 '00 Voteauction, the satirical website which bills itself as "the only election platform channelling 'soft money' directly to the democracy consumer," has fallen victim to a heavy-handed and sometimes illegal campaign against free speech by two corporations and several public officials. On November 1, Network Solutions (the private for-profit corporation in charge of all .com, .net, and .org domains) shut down Vote-auction.com without warning or explanation, shortly after public attacks by the California Secretary of State, and after the Chicago Board of Elections filed an election fraud lawsuit against the domain. Neither the owners nor the service providers received any notification or warning of the shutdown, and Network Solutions has refused to comment on the issue. (See rtmark.com/etoynsi.html for an earlier example of illegal and still unexplained acts by the company.) California Secretary of State Bill Jones seems to have set the stage for this blatant disregard of Constitutional free speech protections by stating last week on CNN that corporate financing of elections is one subject that cannot be discussed: "whether this is a parody... makes absolutely no difference whatsoever in California... because you are talking about the corruption of the voting process." (www.cnn.com/video/burden/2000/10/24/show.rm80.ram) RTMark sponsored Voteauction.com in June (project VOTE, listed at rtmark.com/featured.html#VOTE) precisely because the satirical site helps highlight the ways corporations already effectively purchase votes. As law professor Jamin Raskin said about Voteauction, "...we have now evolved a system in which it's OK for money to buy elections, and yet we somehow cling to the fantasy that there's something deeply immoral about the purchase of an individual vote." (www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,38559,00.html) RTMark and many others believe that if U.S. authorities such as Bill Jones wish to purge the election process of corruption, they should start by preventing corporations from spending unlimited sums on electing particular candidates, not by stopping a satire that highlights the problem. As one commentator wrote, "few would disagree that the problem with money in politics today is the hundreds of millions of dollars at the top, not a few dollars at the bottom. Which is why the short-lived vote sale should be seen less as a serious act of sabotage and more as guerrilla theater." (slate.msn.com/netelection/entries/00-08-23_88646.asp) Network Solutions' illegal deletion of the Vote-auction.com domain is just the latest blow in a series of actions that have closed the satirical website three times since it opened in August. 1: In August, Voteauction.com founder James Baumgartner, a graduate student, was told by New York State Board of Elections officials that they would press charges against him; they even implied that he could be guilty of treason, which is punishable by execution. Baumgartner, faced with what amounted to an official state-sponsored death threat, had little choice but to close the site on August 18, at which point RTMark helped transfer the domain to its current Austrian owner, Hans Bernhard, who immediately re-opened Voteauction.com with new features. 2. On October 21, Domain Bank, the U.S. company with which Voteauction.com had been registered, illegally froze the domain. Bernhard responded by registering Vote-auction.com (with an added hyphen) with a company located outside U.S. jurisdiction. 3: On November 1, to circumvent this approach, Network Solutions, without warning and in clear violation of international law, removed Vote-auction.com from its root servers (the computers that provide domain information to all others). It is unknown who requested this action, and under what authority Network Solutions feels justified in performing it. Andy Mueller-Maguhn, a newly-elected director of ICANN, the non-profit corporation responsible for all internet domains, agreed this was an illegal move and said "I guess we will have to do something about this." In response to Network Solution's attack, the Voteauction team has begun gathering Vote-auction and Voteauction domains around the world and is calling on other domain owners to point their domains or sub-domains to 62.116.31.68, the Voteauction IP (IP addresses are not dependent on domain name registrars or on Internic). If you have a domain or sub-domain that you can point to 62.116.31.68, please do so and forward the information to pr@[62.116.31.68] to be added to a list of supporters. In addition, RTMark has secured a $500 investment, of which $300 will be offered to the first person who can redirect the domain of a major US political candidate (for federal or state office) to 62.116.31.68. The remaining $200 will be offered to the first person to re-route the domain of a major media outlet covering the elections to the Voteauction IP. RTMark's primary goal is to publicize corporate subversion of the democratic process. To this end it acts as a clearinghouse for anti-corporate projects. www.rtmark.com/voteauction.html add your own comments