Torrent Site KickassTorrents Changes Domain: Problems With Domain Result In Website Getting Banned

Popular torrent site KickassTorrents has changed its domain, after its Somalian domain was banned by authorities.

According to news website Mashable, KickassTorrents' web address, www.kickass.so, became unavailable on Monday. This web address has a Somalia top level domain, which was acquired last November.

A check in the Somalian .SO registry, which records sites permitted by the country's Ministry of Information, Post and Telecommunications (MIPT), showed that the www.kickass.so web address has already been listed as "banned."

KickassTorrent changed its web address to www.kickass.to, which has a Tongan top-level domain. This was the website's old address, even before it launched with a Somalia top level domain.

Mashable reported that KickassTorrents rotates its top level domain on a regular basis, supposedly to prevent issues with the Tongan domain.

This was not the first time KickassTorrents had to change its domain name. In 2011, it used the address www.kat.ph after the Unted States Department of Justice launched a massive effort to seize illegal domain names. It also once used the address www.ka.tt.

KickassTorrents was founded in 2008 to provide torrent files and magnet links. The torrent webiste uses BitTorrent protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing.

According to the report on the Time Magazine website, KickassTorrents is "one of the Internet's most popular web sites," based on a ranking made by online analytics company Alexa.

KickassTorrents has been blocked in the United Kingdom, after the High Court in London ruled in February 2013 that the site's design contributed to copyright infringement.

Last year, another popular torrent site, The Pirate Bay, went down for nearly a month following a police raid on site's servers. The website resurrected last December.