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By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
September 29, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- At a hearing held Friday, a Kentucky judge denied the state government's attempt to seize 141 domain names associated with Internet gambling sites.
According to a report this weekend by the Louisville Courier-Journal's Stephenie Steitzer, judge Thomas Wingate asked that attorneys representing the state and the owners of the domain names in question submit briefs describing the issues involved in the case, which he would need some more time to understand fully.
Last week, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear launched a civil case against the long list of domains - including such properties as sportsbook.com and pokerstars.com - last week, claiming they were involved in illegal activities. Judge Wingate initially ordered the domains transferred to the state, pending objections from the domain owners.
Later in the week, objections from almost all of the sites had been filed, as the case, and the initial ruling, sparked a considerable online controversy. As of Friday, two domains whose owners failed to oppose the ruling had been transferred to the state, highrollerslounge.com and luckypyramidcasino.com. Neither site is accessible via its domain, though the Kentucky government has said it did not shut down the sites.
According to the Courier-Journal report, about two-dozen attorneys representing gambling industry associations and Internet commerce groups attended Friday's hearing. The defense reportedly argued that Wingate should dismiss the case. While they weren't fully successful in that regard, they appear to have convinced him that further deliberation is in order.
The state's goal in filing the civil suit was originally to block access by Kentucky residents to the sites, which Bashear notably described as "leeches on our community." The "leeches" statement refers to the millions spent by Kentuckians on online betting sites, which are not hosted locally and contribute nothing to the state in terms of tax money or other fees. State-sanctioned gambling, particularly at horse racing tracks, is a big business in Kentucky. And Bashear is reportedly a proponent of state-sanctioned casino gambling.
The Courier-Journal article quotes Kentucky Justice Cabinet Secretary J. Michael Brown, who says the case has succeeded in getting the attention of gambling sites, which might be more likely at this point to hear the state's demands that the sites block access by Kentucky residents.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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