to be frank.

Hope Fitwatch invite themselves onto Nominet's committee.

There are no special powers for the police to extrajudicially suspend the use of, say, a premises, or of a vehicle, a bank account, a driving license, etc, etc. because it is being used for crime.
These things can be done through the courts, usually under common law, and the bank, or landlord, or DVLA don't need to update their constitution to deal with the possibility that that they would need to comply with a court order.

It's only because the internet is 'new' that such ridiculous ideas as police representation on what is essentially a technical body can arise.

The utility of this proposal for the police lies exactly in the possibility of it being misused, for example for 'operational' reasons, which would, by their representation on Nominet, then be legitimised, just as their representation on licensing commitees legitimises their control for 'operational' reasons over, for example, venues which play music for a black audience (go google Form 696).


So the liberal argument is that we already have a working structure for such interference, which the police should feed into if they seek control over domains. To take more direct a role than just the power to apply to the courts is to separate off the internet as a separate and more dangerous realm requiring the possibility of preemptive law enforcement (ie supression for 'operational' reasons).

There are a number of more anarchist arguments, but they'll maybe be less to nominet's taste.



The worrying thing for me about this one is it mirrors a brown-era idea to give government control of domain resolution, ie routing to all domains not just .uk, that time for the suppression of terrorist sites.