EveryDNS.net Terminates Wikileaks.org DNS Services, Wikileaks.ch Back Up in Switzerland
EveryDNS.net, which provided DNS services to the wikileaks.org domain has terminated them at 10 PM EST, December 2, 2010, citing threats to the stability of their infrastructure.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second time WikiLeaks has lost its .org foothold: back in February 2008, its domain was deleted and the site needed legal help to get it restored. This week's move follows a different script — no court order, but EveryDNS.net itself terminating DNS for wikileaks.org at 10 PM EST on December 2, citing threats to its own infrastructure's stability.
It lands two days after Senator Lieberman's office pressed Amazon into dropping WikiLeaks' hosting, per TPMMuckraker's account of how that decision was reached — though paidContent reports Amazon denies acting because of any government inquiry. With Threat Level having argued in August that a cyberwar against WikiLeaks would fail, the site's rapid re-emergence at Wikileaks.ch in Switzerland reads as an early test of that thesis.
First-order effects
- EveryDNS.net's infrastructure-stability justification makes it the second US provider in three days to sever WikiLeaks — Amazon dropped its hosting on December 1 — leaving the site reachable only through the new Wikileaks.ch mirror in Switzerland.
- WikiLeaks' response shows the counter-move works: registering under a different top-level domain and moving DNS resolution outside US jurisdiction restores access within roughly a day of the cutoff.
Second-order effects
- Other US-based providers now face the same choice EveryDNS made between uptime risk and political pressure, pushing WikiLeaks further toward non-US registrars, hosts and mirrors as a matter of operational design rather than ideology.
- The paidContent-reported ambiguity over whether Amazon acted on a government inquiry or commercial judgment puts every distributor in the chain — DNS, hosting, payment — on notice that either rationale can end their relationship with WikiLeaks.
Third-order effects
- If each takedown simply relocates the site across jurisdictions, pressure migrates from single-provider decisions toward coordinated, multi-jurisdiction action — raising the question of whether DNS and hosting layers become instruments of policy rather than neutral utilities.
- A pattern of US infrastructure firms dropping one client under threat-of-attack justifications could push politically exposed sites to treat jurisdictional redundancy — multiple TLDs, multiple countries — as baseline architecture.
The trend: Critical internet infrastructure providers are becoming choke points where political pressure gets applied, while targets respond by distributing themselves across jurisdictions faster than they can be severed.