Internet Governance and Enforcement Needed: Not Just One-Off Legal Spats
February 5, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
“Web Publisher Seeks Injunctive Relief to Address Web Scraper’s Domain Name Maneuvers Intended to Avoid Court Order” at first glance is another tale of woe about a content or information publisher getting its content sucked down and into another service. This happens frequently, and the limp robots.txt file does not thwart the savvy content vacuum cleaner which is digitally Hoovering its way to a minimally viable product.
An outfit called Chegg creates or recycles information to create answers to homework problems. Students, who want to have more time for swiping left and right, subscribe and use Chegg to achieve academic certification. The outfit running the digital Hoover uses different domains; for example, Homeworkify.EU and then to Homeworkify.st. This change made it possible for Homeworkify to continue sucking down Chegg’s content.
One must know where to look, have the expertise to pull away the surface, and exert effort to eliminate the problem. Thanks, MSFT Copilot Bing thing. How’s the email security today? Oh, too bad.
The write up explains that the matter is in court, the parties are seeking a decision which validates their position, and the matter bumbles onward.
My take on this is different, and I am reasonably confident that it may make pro-Chegg and pro-Homeworkify advocates uncomfortable. Here are my observations:
- Neither outfit strikes me as particularly savvy when it comes to protecting or accessing online content. There are numerous Clear Web and Dark Web sites which engage in interesting actions, and investigators often have difficulty figuring out who is who, and what what is a who doing. One example from our own recent research has been our effort to determine “who” or “what” is behind the domain altenen.is. There are some hurdles to get over before the question can be answered. The operators of certain sites like the credit card outfit move around from domain to domain. This is accomplished automatically.
- The domain name registrars are an interesting group of companies. Upon examination, an ISP can be a domain reseller, operate an auction service buyers and sellers of “registered” domains, or operate as an ISP, a provider of virtual hosting, a domain name seller, and a domain name marketplace with connections to other domain name businesses. Getting lost in this mostly unregulated niche is quite easy. The sophisticated operators can appear to be a legitimate company with alleged locations in France or Russia. One outfit engaged in some interesting “reseller” activities appears to be in jail is Israel. But his online operation continues to hum along.
- The obfuscation of domains is facilitated by outfits based in salubrious locations like the Seychelles. Drop in and check out the businesses sometime when you are in Somalia or cruising the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Africa. The “specialists” located in remote regions provide “air cover” for individuals engaged in interesting business activities like running encrypted email services for allegedly bad actors and strong supporters of specialist “groups.”
Now back to the problem of Chegg and Homeworkify. My take on this dust up is:
- Neither outfit is sufficiently advanced to [a] prevent content access or [b] getting caught.
- Dumping the matter into a legal process means [a] spending lots of money on lawyers and [b] learning that no one understands what is taking place and why these actions are different from what’s being Hoovered by some of the most respected techno feudalists in the world. The cloud of unknowing will be thick as these issues are discussed.
- The focus should include attention and then action toward what I call “the enablers.” Who or what is an enabler? That’s easy. The basic services of the Internet governance entities and the failure to license certain firms who provide technology to facilitate problematic online activity.
Net net: Until regulation and consequences are imposed on the enablers, there will be more dust ups like the one between Chegg and Homeworkify.
PS. I am not too keen on selling short cuts to learning.
Stephen E Arnold, February 5, 2024
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