Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Availability and immediate reactions

  • Users quickly share working mirrors (.se, .li, other TLDs) and note some are already country/ISP-blocked.
  • Several mention discovering and bookmarking Anna’s Archive only because of prior blocking controversies, seeing the suspension as a “Streisand effect” moment and free publicity.

DNS, Wikipedia, and censorship

  • The project’s advice to “check our Wikipedia page for latest domains” prompts debate:
    • One side: listing URLs for a notable project is normal encyclopedia behavior, not “being used as DNS.”
    • Other side: in practice it’s a way to route around DNS blocks, which could invite legal or political pressure on Wikipedia itself.
  • People argue over whether linking to allegedly illegal services can itself be illegal, with conflicting claims about US law and Google case law.
  • Some highlight Wikipedia’s editorial decisions (e.g., not linking to certain controversial sites) as evidence of moral gatekeeping.

Registrars, ServerHold, and precedent

  • Commenters dissect the .org “ServerHold” status and note it is typically used for legal orders or disputes, not casual abuse handling.
  • Comparisons are drawn to other recent takedowns (e.g., Gaza video archive, extremist sites), where registrars used clientHold/serverHold and sometimes reversed decisions after public backlash.
  • There is criticism of registrars and infrastructure providers (Namecheap, Cloudflare, etc.) acting as de facto content moderators.

Spotify scrape as likely trigger

  • Many connect the timing to Anna’s recent blog post about “backing up Spotify” (hundreds of TB, covering most played tracks).
  • Some question the strategy: publicizing the scrape “pokes the bear” (labels and music industry) and risks undermining the broader archiving mission.
  • Others argue AA’s explicit anti-copyright stance makes such actions consistent with their goals, even at higher legal risk.

Decentralized and alternative access

  • Strong interest in more resilient access: Tor .onion, I2P, Yggdrasil, IPFS, mutable torrents/DHT, Namecoin, GNU Name System, Ethereum, Nostr (for announcing new domains).
  • Tension between resilience and usability: Tor/I2P have UX and performance issues (especially on mobile), Nostr is unfamiliar and relay-dependent, IPFS hosting AA content is often removed.
  • Many stress torrents and volunteer seeding as the true backbone that can’t easily be taken down, with domains as replaceable “skins.”

Archiving, piracy, and non‑profit questions

  • Some frame AA as a cultural “seed vault” preserving literature, research, and now music; others worry about uncompensated authors and mixing legitimate open-access goals with wholesale piracy.
  • Root-cause view: paywalled research and aggressive copyright terms drive demand for shadow libraries; solving access to research would reduce the need for gray archives that also host commercial books/music.
  • Users debate whether AA’s “non-profit” claim is meaningful without a legal entity or transparency; some suspect significant monetization via “donations,” VIP access, and LLM dataset sales, while others note that aggressive fundraising is normal even for genuine charities.

.org, jurisdiction, and broader implications

  • Multiple commenters stress that .org has always been under a US-based operator (PIR) and subject to US legal pressure; it was never a censorship-safe TLD.
  • The incident is cited as another data point that centralized DNS and PKI are fragile political choke points, strengthening calls for decentralized naming and routing systems.