Pirates ascending to greener domains

Under pressure once again from the entertainment industry, The Pirate Bay has upped sticks and moved to a new .AC domain, based on the isolated volcanic Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean. The move comes after the website’s previous domain registry in Sint Maarten - a Dutch protectorate - was seized. The Pirate Bay team said the website’s former .SX domain appears to have been seized overnight, reported TorrentFreak, who speculated that the domain seizure may be connected to the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, which represents a number of copyright holders in the music, film, and gaming industries. Operators quickly relocated to the piratebay.ac web address, which uses the Ascension Island’s country code top-level domain (ccTLD). But they will not be docking there forever because Ascension Island, and by extension the .AC domain, is controlled by the UK and British authorities are not fans of The Pirate Bay - the website is routinely blocked by British ISPs, according to the Inquirer, a European site for computer news. The next destination for the infamous torrent site is the Peruvian .PE registry, which will become its fifth domain name in 2013. Once based in Sweden but fearing seizure by Swedish authorities, the site moved to Greenland, then to Iceland, before acquiring its .SX domain. I just hope they can find a suitable destination eventually.