So, does anyone else think that our almost 50 year-long temper-tantrum over the nationalization of property owned by Americans in Cuba might sometimes go a bit too far?
From the New York Times:
Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government.[...]
It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.
Note that the European travel agent, whose servers are physically in the Bahamas, apparently doesn’t sell trips to Americans. He just had the misfortune to have used an American domain registrar and to have annoyed the Treasury Department.
Setting aside that it’s long past time for the U.S. to normalize relations with Cuba, doesn’t such an act on the part of the feds seem a bit…overreaching?