News

Anti-Stephen Conroy website back online

A website that was taken offline by the domain name regulator .au Domain Administration, is now back online and continuing its protest against the Government’s internet filtering policy.  

The site Stephenconroy.com.au, which takes aim at the Communications Minister Stephen Conroy for his policy on what it deems as internet censorship, was taken down by auDA at the end of last month less than two days after it went live.

At the time, questions arose over the swiftness of the auDA’s move to shut the site down.

The domain name had been registered by Sapia Pty Ltd. It responded by quickly returning online under the domain stephen-conroy.com.

In the latest development, the business name Stephenconroy has now been lodged in Victoria, allowing the site’s owners to continue to use the Stephenconroy.com.au domain name.

The site’s owners had this to say about the auDA:

Following a prolonged and public appeal to auDA they ultimately ignored all representations regarding our eligibility to hold the stephenconroy.com.au and related domain names. After the domains were placed in ‘pending-delete’ they were allowed to expire earlier today [January 4] and were returned to the publicly available pool of names. As they were not immediately registered we were able to re-register, and now once again hold, stephenconroy.com.au.

The Australian Domain Administrator continually stated during our previous exchanges that they considered us ineligible at the time of original registration. While we were given 14 days to explain our eligibility prior to the domains being deleted they were completely unwilling to listen to any argument past the initial three hour period we were given prior to the takedown.

In order to avoid any confusion regarding our eligibility for the new registration we would like to take this opportunity to state that, further to the previous reasons stated for our eligibility, the registrant of stephenconroy.com.au (Sapia Pty Ltd ABN 94 140 321 240) owns registered Vic business name ‘STEPHENCONROY’.”

The site is now calling on people to join a rally on January 30, to protest against the Government’s internet filtering policy.

The Government has been widely criticised for its policy. A campaign on the issue was created for political activism group Get Up! and was part of the Mumbrella Readers Choice Awards shortlist for social media campaign of the year.

Last year, the Fake Stephen Conroy debacle saw the communications minister targeted by a Telstra employee through Twitter.

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