US Blocks Websites it Dislikes

 For several years, going back to 2019 that I know of, the Taliban had a website, alemarahenglish.net

Then the US noticed, and had the company that sold them the name alemarahenglish.net remove it from all nameservers, so if one tries to access the website, the web cannot find it. Every web address is a number having 4 to 12 digits called the Internet Protocol or IP address. Google is at 142.250.181.14

Of course, very few of us know that Google is at 142.250.181.14, so some clever person came up with the nameservers that look up the names, find the numerical IP address, and allow your computer to connect. To connect to, e.g., google.com, your computer browser must have the address of a nameserver (or you would have to give your browser the IP address of google.com), and that nameserver searches all the nameservers holding all the registered names on the Internet, until it finds the IP address of Google.com and sends your browser to 142.250.181.14

The US went to the owners of the nameservers that knew the name of the Taliban website and its IP address, a company called Tucows, and had Tucows remove the Taliban's name, alemarahenglish.net from the nameserver, so if one tries to connect, every web browser just says, 'We’re having trouble finding that site.' So no web brower can connect to the Taliban website. If I had saved the IP address, I could check, but it looked like the ISP hosting the Taliban website took the website down, so even if one knew the IP address, one still could not connect. (One typically buys the name for one's website from a company that sells names, and then finds another company to host one's website.)

The US tried to do that to Iran. Iran had a webserver, presstv.com 

Iran had to buy the name presstv.com from a vendor outside Iran, and the US had the company that owns the nameserver that had the presstv.com name point to a US government webserver

Sadly, the civil servant who funded the development of the Internet wanted it to be a tool that would allow the US military to communicate during a war with the USSR, when the USSR would be doing everything a superpower could do to block the US military from communicating.

So the Iranians put their news website on presstv.ir which has its own nameserver, and the US has been unable to block it.

Net: it would behove the Taliban to work with Iran, Russia, and/or the PRC, any of whom could get the Taliban website up and running in a day or so, and protected so the US cannot block it.

However, the Taliban were created by the US to make trouble for the USSR, and they are still designated terrorists under Russian law. Also, they are a sect of Islam that hates the Ayatollahs. And the CIA has been telling them lies about the PRC genocide of Muslims in Xinjiang. So it is not clear if they will be able to make friends with Iran, Russia, or the PRC, something they desperately need to do.

Before, when the Taliban ran Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, only 3 countries gave them diplomatic recognition: Pakistan and 2 small Arab countries. They could not convince any other country to give them recognition or a seat at the UN. Of course, they were happy to live in the 7th century: if the Prophet did not have it, the Taliban's Afghanistan didn't need it. But that was 20 years ago, and the new and improved Taliban would like to live a little differently. For which they need other countries to recognise them and help them.

Russia and the PRC did not close their Embassies when the Taliban took over Afghanistan. The Russian Embassy is fully open, while the PRC had most of its staff return to the PRC but left a skeleton staff to keep the Embassy nominally open. Most European countries, and, of course, the US, closed their Embassies in Afghanistan.

So some of us are wondering in what direction Afghanistan will be going. And with whom.