The United States has often presented itself as the guardian of Internet free speech. China may censor the Internet, and otherwise-civilized nations such as Germany or France may attempt to block what they view as unacceptable material, but the United States of America likes to think of itself as a place that doesn't censor people online... unless you happen to own a foreign travel business that offers trips to Cuba. Under such circumstances, as Steve Marshall discovered, all bets are off.

Steve Marshall is a British citizen living in Spain. For the past decade, he has operated an online travel agency that specializes in selling trips to Cuba to various European nationals. Marshall operated a number of Cuban-specific web sites, including several that focused specifically on the literary and historical aspects of Cuba, and maintained them in English, French, and Spanish. The Internet Archive has some of Marshall's web material on file. The sites themselves don't appear to have been particularly well-designed—both Flash and text ads abound—but there's no evidence that Marshall failed to provide the services he advertised.

According to the Department of the Treasury, however, Marshall and his business helped Americans evade the US embargo against Cuba. A 2004 DoT (Department of the Treasury) press release stated: "This travel provider is not only a generator of resources that the Cuban regime uses to oppress its people, but it also facilitates the evasion of U.S. sanction policy." The PR goes on to assert that Tour and Marketing International Ltd. (Marshall's company) advertised itself as the number one agency for American travelers, claimed it could serve any traveler, and insisted that Americans interested in traveling to Cuba use the company's online payment system.

Marshall's domain name registrar, eNom, is based in the US. It apparently didn't learn that his company had been blacklisted for two and a half years. When it did, however, the registrar promptly shut down Marshall's sites without notification and has since refused to release the domain names to him. Marshall has since rebuilt his business using a European registrar and the .net rather than the .com suffix, but his experience raises troubling questions.

As previously noted, Marshall is a British citizen operating a business from Spain, with servers located in the Bahamas. He does not claim that no Americans ever visited Cuba, but he has stated that he was uninterested in marketing his services to the US. In this case, the Department of the Treasury was able to shut down his business without notification or negotiation of any sort. Even if he wanted to appeal the decision, Marshall has no organization to which he can appeal, save his registrar, which can simply claim to have been following government orders.

If the US intends to continue presenting itself as the guardian of Internet rights, situations like this require a bit more delicacy. By effectively shutting down Marshall's business, the United States has committed the censorship it condemns in other nations. Even worse, the Department of Treasury effectively shut down an international business without any type of due process. Both France and Germany followed a court process when investigating Yahoo for alleged improprieties, and the company in question (Yahoo) had the opportunity to respond to the charges in a court of law. Marshall was afforded no such luxury.

While the Internet may be global in nature, foreign companies may very well limit their use of US registrars and hosting services out of concern that activities targeted at other countries could be shut down here.

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