It's old news, but domain name registrar GoDaddy hit the headlines last week when it temporarily disabled the Seclists.org domain name. Some brightspark had posted some MySpace user account details, including passwords, to the Seclists.org hosted Full Disclosure computer security mailing list.

It pissed off MySpace something awful, so it contacted GoDaddy, which happily pulled the plug on the domain name precisely 52 seconds after leaving a voicemail for the domain name owner. It's back up now, but the site operator -- security geek Fyodor, who wrote the nmap security scanner -- had to spend hours convincing GoDaddy to ressurect the domain.

Keep in mind the content was not actually hosted by GoDaddy. The company merely acted as the domain name registrar for SecLists.org.

So where does this leave us netizens? Is it right that a large company can just ask a registrar to drop a popular domain name into a black hole?

Dropping domains at the registrar level is a great way of making content disappear. And GoDaddy has hinted it frequently pulls down domain names associated with child pornography -- I doubt any reasonable person would object to that.

Free market advocates are in a tough spot here. They believe in free speech and they hate regulation, but it seems some regulations and governance controls need to be put in place to secure free speech on the 'net.

But how can we appropriately regulate the practices of domain name registrars? Of course we need to give registrars the power to pull down objectionable content like kiddie-porn. But where do we draw the line? Hate-based sites like Stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi forum? Bomb plans? Online chemistry projects? Fundamentalist ideology? Fringe ideology? Kittenwars.com?

The sad thing is, if the morons at GoDaddy had stuck to pulling down kiddie-porn, we wouldn't even need to have this conversation.

While this all gets sorted out, you can check out Fyodor's new Web-site: Nodaddy.com