Texas court orders Verisign to lock motherless.com over age-verification defiance

A Texas court has ordered Verisign, the registry operator for the .com top-level domain, to place motherless.com on registry lock, effectively cutting off the site’s ability to operate under its domain. The action follows Kick Online Entertainment’s refusal to respond to an April 2024 lawsuit from Attorney General Ken Paxton over violations of Texas’s age-verification law. Kick let the case go to default judgment and ignored the resulting permanent injunction requiring it to verify users’ ages, so the state escalated from monetary penalties to seizing control of the domain itself. To reclaim the name, Kick must post a $9.14 million bond and implement compliant age verification.

The significance here is jurisdictional rather than technical. By using a writ of attachment against a domain name and directing it at Verisign — a US company that controls the .com registry — Texas found a lever to enforce state law against a foreign operator that simply refused to engage with the court. Rather than chasing an uncooperative overseas company for fines it will never pay, the state disabled the asset the business depends on.

The precedent is likely to draw scrutiny well beyond the adult-content context. Treating a domain name as attachable property that a state AG can freeze through the registry operator is a powerful enforcement mechanism, and it raises broader questions about domain stability, due process for operators served only by default, and how far state-level content laws can reach through internet infrastructure chokepoints.