How does the FBI take down and restrict certain websites?
In: Other
There’s a few important factors to consider. Generally speaking the FBI can only seize what resides in the US or what a host country allows them to. So they can’t just take down some random website hosted in a foreign country, for example.
However, relations between countries plays a part here….if a website is identified as targeting or harmful to the US, and we have good relations with the country the servers are hosted in, they *may* be allowed to seize the web servers.
If they can’t seize the servers themselves, they generally can’t take down a website, however they may be able to seize the domain name. This is possible because domains are ultimately controlled by [ICANN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN). ICANN was originally created by the US Government and therefor all domains were in some fashion under control by the US. It has since transitioned into multistakeholder model where it is now owned by various Internet stakeholders from around the world. As such the US Government has less control over it, but the US as a whole is still a pretty big player in the world, they can still throw some weight around to take control of domains used to harm the US.
tl;dr – The US has pretty good relations with many of the big players in regard to the internet. If the FBI desires to take down a website because it’s harmful to the US, that website is either hosted outside of their reach entirely and survives, or the FBI is able to pull enough strings to seize the web server hosting the site or domain name pointing to it. This pretty much only happens when it involves criminal activity though, it’s not something that just happens out of the blue because the FBI doesn’t like your website.
The simplest way is by seizing the server that the website is running on, and disconnecting it or shutting it down.
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