Thomas Goolnik

Last updated

Thomas Goolnik is a man formerly associated with the company TLD Networks. He has achieved notoriety in a battle over the European "Right To Be Forgotten" (RTBF), in particular whether current articles written about the RTBF are also subject to that regulation.

Contents

TLD Network complaint and settlement

TLD Networks was an alternative domain name network set up by Thomas Goolnik in 2001. On February 28, 2002, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, in Chicago, issued an injunction that suspended the registration of certain web sites that were registered with TLD Networks. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had filed the complaint, alleging that TLD Network Ltd, TLD Networks, Quantum Management Ltd, TBS Industries Ltd and Thomas Goolnik advertised and sold alternative DNS root domains, i.e. having top-level domains not approved by ICANN. The story of the original indictment was reported by The New York Times in an article on March 12, 2002. [1] Regulators alleged that the defendants raised $1 million in registration fees during their nine months of operation.

A settlement was reached with the FTC in 2002 which, among other things, barred TLD Networks and Thomas Goolnik "from making misrepresentations about the usability of domain names or about the nature of any product or service they sell over the Internet." [2]

In November 2003 the FTC took additional action, filing an amended complaint adding Barclays Bank PLC as a post-judgment relief defendant in the case. [3]

RTBF requests and responses

In September 2014, Goolnik was successful in getting articles removed under the right to be forgotten. The UK Government Information Commission Office also ruled in Goolnik's favour. The New York Times was notified by Google that five articles had been removed from its search results to comply with a European "Right to be Forgotten" request. The paper published an article describing the five items removed. [4] Three were on matters of small public importance (two wedding notices and a paid death notice); one was a favorable review of a theater production. The remaining article, and the one receiving most of the attention, was the 2002 story on the injunction against TLD Network, et al.

On October 6, 2014, the web site Techdirt wrote a brief commentary on the 2014 Times article. [5] Techdirt and the article's author, Mike Masnick, are frequent critics of the Right to be Forgotten.[ citation needed ]

On August 25, 2015, Techdirt reported that its article commenting on the 2014 New York Times article had similarly been removed from European searches due to a Right to be Forgotten request. [6] While there is no proof, Masnick surmises that there is a "decent likelihood" that the request came from Goolnik.

On September 4, 2015, when the August 25 article was also removed from Google search in Europe. [7] The article points out that the EU states that an RTBF request should be evaluated to see if the information is "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed," while Techdirt argues that their article, "discusses newsworthy and relevant information about Thomas Goolnik today, which is that he's filing a series of right to be forgotten requests to Google."

The New York Times September 2014 story has become a commonly used example of the effects of RTBF, for example an October 2015 story by Daphne Keller. [8] Keller's article linked to the Times article, but did not mention Goolnik by name, elliptically referring to him as "a European businessman ...."

On March 27, 2019, Techdirt published another article by Mike Masnick indicating another RTBF request had resulted in the previous articles on the site about Thomas Goolnik again being delisted. [9] That article was delisted less than a month later, and Techdirt covered the story again on April 18, 2019. [10] This was repeated again on March 9, 2022, resulting in the Techdirt tag page for 'thomas goolnik' being temporarily delisted from Google. [11]

Related Research Articles

A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of the domain name, that is, the last non-empty label of a fully qualified domain name. For example, in the domain name www.example.com, the top-level domain is .com. Responsibility for management of most top-level domains is delegated to specific organizations by the ICANN, an Internet multi-stakeholder community, which operates the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and is in charge of maintaining the DNS root zone.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Domain name</span> Identification string in the Internet

In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. Domain names are used in various networking contexts and for application-specific naming and addressing purposes. In general, a domain name identifies a network domain or an Internet Protocol (IP) resource, such as a personal computer used to access the Internet, or a server computer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Network Solutions</span> American-based technology company

Network Solutions, LLC, formerly Web.com is an American-based technology company and a subsidiary of Web.com, the 4th largest .com domain name registrar with over 6.7 million registrations as of August 2018. In addition to being a domain name registrar, Network Solutions provides web services such as web hosting, website design and online marketing, including search engine optimization and pay per click management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">.uk</span> Internet country code top-level domain for the United Kingdom

.uk is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the United Kingdom. It was first registered in July 1985, seven months after the original generic top-level domains such as .com and the first country code after .us.

Lumen, formerly Chilling Effects, is an American collaborative archive created by Wendy Seltzer and operated by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. It allows recipients of cease-and-desist notices to submit them to the site and receive information about their legal rights and responsibilities.

A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all two-letter top-level domains are ccTLDs.

The Domain Name System of the Internet consists of a set of top-level domains that constitute the root domain of the hierarchical name space and database. In the growth of the Internet, it became desirable to expand the initial set of six generic top-level domains in 1984. As a result, new top-level domain names have been proposed for implementation by ICANN. Such proposals included a variety of models ranging from adoption of policies for unrestricted gTLDs that could be registered by anyone for any purpose, to chartered gTLDs for specialized uses by specialized organizations. In October 2000, ICANN published a list of proposals for top-level domain strings it had received.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mike Masnick</span> American blogger (born 1974)

Michael Masnick is an American editor and entrepreneur. He is the CEO and founder of Techdirt, a weblog.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Streisand effect</span> Increased awareness of information caused by efforts to suppress it

The Streisand effect is an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information. The effect is named for American singer and actress Barbra Streisand, whose attorney's attempt in 2003 to suppress the publication of a photograph showing her clifftop residence in Malibu, taken to document coastal erosion in California, inadvertently drew far greater attention to the previously obscure photograph. The effect exemplifies psychological reactance: where the desire to hide information instead makes its propagation more likely.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Techdirt</span> American Internet blog

Techdirt is an American Internet blog that reports on technology's legal challenges and related business and economic policy issues, in context of the digital revolution. It focuses on intellectual property, patent, information privacy and copyright reform in particular.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shiva Ayyadurai</span> Indian-American engineer, conspiracy theorist, and entrepreneur

V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai is an Indian-American engineer, politician, entrepreneur, and anti-vaccine activist. He has become known for promoting conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and unfounded medical claims. Ayyadurai holds four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including a PhD in biological engineering, and is a Fulbright grant recipient.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Is Anybody Down?</span> Non-consensual pornography website

Is Anybody Down? was a revenge porn website founded by Craig Brittain and Chance Trahan where users could anonymously upload nude photographs along with information identifying the person in the photograph. The site also contained a section of nude photographs titled "Anonymous Bounty", where users were offered "free stuff" if they could provide the Facebook or Twitter information of any of the people pictured. In concept, the website recapitulated the now-defunct Is Anyone Up?, which was shut down in April 2012, shortly before an FBI investigation into the propriety of the site.

The right to be forgotten (RTBF) is the right to have private information about a person be removed from Internet searches and other directories in some circumstances. The issue has arisen from desires of individuals to "determine the development of their life in an autonomous way, without being perpetually or periodically stigmatized as a consequence of a specific action performed in the past". The right entitles a person to have data about them deleted so that it can no longer be discovered by third parties, particularly through search engines.

Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González (2014) is a decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). It held that an Internet search engine operator is responsible for the processing that it carries out of personal information which appears on web pages published by third parties.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monkey selfie copyright dispute</span> Copyright dispute involving Celebes crested macaques

Between 2011 and 2018, a series of disputes took place about the copyright status of selfies taken by Celebes crested macaques using equipment belonging to the British wildlife photographer David J. Slater. The disputes involved Wikimedia Commons and the blog Techdirt, which have hosted the images following their publication in newspapers in July 2011 over Slater's objections that he holds the copyright, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who have argued that the copyright should be assigned to the macaque.

Andrew Norton is a British roboticist, politician and researcher. He is a former Coordinator of Pirate Parties International, a previous Chairman of the United States Pirate Party and a previous Chairman of the Board for Pirate Party UK.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">.tech</span> Internet top-level domain

.Tech is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) of the Domain Name System (DNS) used in the Internet. The name is truncated from technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">.online</span>

.online is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) of the Domain Name System (DNS) used in the Internet.

Since its founding in 2005, the American video-sharing website YouTube has been faced with a growing number of privacy issues, including allegations that it allows users to upload unauthorized copyrighted material and allows personal information from young children to be collected without their parents' consent.

Appin was an Indian cyberespionage company started in 2003 and run by brothers Rajat and Anuj Khare. Although it initially started as a cybersecurity training firm, by 2010 the company had begun providing hacking services for governments and corporate clients. In 2013, a report by Shadowserver Foundation pointed to evidence linking Appin to several hacks of high-profile organizations.

References

  1. ↑ Lee, Jennifer (March 12, 2002). "3 Web Sites Closed in Spam Inquiry". The New York Times . Retrieved 5 September 2015.
  2. ↑ "Bogus Domain Name Seller Settles FTC Charges". Federal Trade Commission. December 3, 2002. Retrieved 9 October 2018.
  3. ↑ "TLD Network Ltd., Quantum Management (GB) Ltd., TBS Industries Ltd., Thomas Goolnik, and Edward Harris Goolnik". Federal Trade Commission. November 12, 2003. Retrieved 5 September 2015.
  4. ↑ Cohen, Noam (October 3, 2014). "Times Articles Removed from Google Results in Europe". The New York Times . Retrieved 5 September 2015.
  5. ↑ Masnick, Mike (October 6, 2014). "Right To Be Forgotten Hits The NY Times". Techdirt . Retrieved 5 September 2015.
  6. ↑ Masnick, Mike (August 25, 2015). "Google Disappears Techdirt Article About Right To Be Forgotten Due To Right To Be Forgotten. Request". Techdirt . Retrieved 5 September 2015.
  7. ↑ Masnick, Mike (February 4, 2015). "Thomas Goolnik Really Wants To Be Forgotten: Google Disappears Our Post About His Right To Be Forgotten Request". Techdirt . Retrieved 3 August 2020.
  8. ↑ Keller, Daphne. "New EU Law Will Tell U.S. What Can Be Said — And Built — On the Internet". Re/code. Retrieved 3 August 2020.
  9. ↑ Masnick, Mike (Mar 27, 2019). "Thomas Goolnik Again Convinces Google To Forget Our Story About Thomas Goolnik Getting Google To Forget Our Story About Thomas Goolnik". Techdirt . Retrieved 2019-03-27.
  10. ↑ Masnick, Mike (April 18, 2019). "That Was Quick: Thomas Goolnik Already Gets Google To Forget Our Latest Story About Thomas Goolnik Getting Google To Forget Stories About Thomas Goolnik". Techdirt . Retrieved 2019-04-18.
  11. ↑ Masnick, Mike (Mar 9, 2022). "Once Again, Thomas Goolnik Gets Google To Forget Our Tag About Thomas Goolnik". Techdirt . Retrieved 2022-03-19.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.