The Somalian top-level domain .so from KickassTorrent has been blocked. The torrent site is therefore back on its old .to domain. The reason of the block is unknown.
KickassTorrents is one of the largest torrent sites in the world and after The Pirate Bay went down in December, the site was able to attract even more visitors. The website was hosted on a Somalian .so domain for a long time but the organization that manages the .so domains has decided to seize the domain. Also a fake version of the site, which used the domain name kickasstorrents.so has been blocked.
The official reason for the seizure of the domain name has not been given, according to TorrentFreak. However chances are the registry has received complaints from the entertainment industry and has been pressured by the government.
Because of the seizure KickassTorrents is back on its old .to domain which the torrent site already used before. The .to domain registry is governed by the island kingdom of Tonga.
The seizure of a domain name by a registry is not new, the administrators of The Pirate Bay had to switch domains several times. Nevertheless, the measure is very ineffective, users quickly find new torrent sites again using search engines like Google and Bing.
