One of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s two governments has said it will sue a US domain name company — probably Verisign — for turning off the domain it was using for official government business.
“The Government of the Republic of Srpska will hire legal experts to prepare a lawsuit against the company that disabled the use of the website of the Government of the Republic Srpska without prior notice,” the government said in a statement on its new web site.
It did not name the company in question, but we can narrow it down to a few.
Its old domain, vladars.net, was registered via Dotster, a reseller for Domain.com, part of Newfold Digital. The .net registry is of course Verisign. These are all American companies subject to US legal jurisdiction.
The domain still exists in Whois, but has been removed from the .net zone file and does not resolve.
The Republika Srpska, or Serb Republic, is part of Bosnia and Herzegovina that doesn’t particularly want to be a part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As such, its new domain is in .rs, the ccTLD for neighboring Serbia, rather than Bosnia’s .ba.
The old .net domain was reportedly deleted due to US sanctions against the Republic, which were expanded October 20 to include members of President Milorad Dodik’s family and several corporate entities.
The US accuses the Dodik family of widespread “graft, bribery, and other forms of corruption” and engaging in “divisive ethno-nationalistic rhetoric” to divert attention from their activities. It additionally accuses them of violating the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war in the region in the 1990s.
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