Conroy Wins - Germany De-Registers Wikileaks.de

David Heath
Tuesday, 14 April 2009 09:55

Business IT - Technology

Last Friday, the WikiLeaks organisation confirmed that their wikileaks.de domain registration had been cancelled by the German domain registrar DENIC.

In a press release published on the main wikileaks site and updated only a few hours ago, a spokesperson announced that "On April 9th 2009, the internet domain registration for the investigative journalism site wikileaks.de was suspended without notice by Germany's registration authority DENIC."

This comes only two weeks after the home of German WikiLeaks domain sponsor Theodor Reppe was raided by German authorities.  Documents produced to Reppe at the time made it abundantly clear that the raid was linked to the publication of the ACMA's blacklist.

Just one day after the raid, the German cabinet finalised a proposal to join Australia as the only two Western Democracies to publicly consider a mandatory censorship scheme.

One can only assume that the German blacklist will contain all possible permutations of the WikiLeaks site names.

The pres release was updated a few hours ago with this:

"According to claims of German registration authority DENIC, the Wikileaks.de domain has been sent to DENIC by the Internet domain registrar, 'Beasts Associated' and therefore is 'In Transit.' The registrar claims this had happened as a consequence of 'contract breach' by the domain owner. WikiLeaks has open questions that cannot be answered at this point in time. It also remains unclear whether the 'breach of contract' is related to content on the website or administrative issues."

Updates on this as they become available.