youthforvolpe.ca
Michael Geist has a piece on the pretty amusing "scandal" that's broken out around Joe Volpe's campaign for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. Seems there were some fairly obvious attempts to circumvent campaign finance law preventing corporate donations by having a collection of pharmaceutical executives contribute money through their children.
Someone put up a parody site called "Youthforvolpe.ca" (mirrored here). The site was mentioned in the Globe and Mail this morning, and the article said something about CIRA having a hand in shutting down the site. That struck me as funny, because that's not the sort of thing I think CIRA should be involved in. I wrote Michael and asked about it (he's on the CIRA board). He directed me to a statement CIRA issued this morning.
Basically, the registrar initiated the cancellation of the domain name because they couldn't confirm the Canadian presence requirements of the registrant, who seems to want to remain anonymous. Pulling the domain name effectively shuts down the web site, as the name no longer resolves. CIRA had nothing to do with it.
I run a CIRA registrar in conjunction with my startup and I've never heard of the exact procedures through which registrars are obligated to go when someone initiates a complaint about the genuine nature of the registrant info. The info in this case seems fake. (Try googling +"mike hunt" and "Porky's" and you'll see what I mean). But the speed with which the name was pulled leads me to suspect that perhaps the registrar was threatened in some way? Not a good week for the Volpe campaign.
