Why did wikileaks.org stop working as a way to find the site?
For a traditional website to work it will want a domain name like website.com, so people can find it. Those domain names can stop working for any number of reasons. One commonly assumed action for Wikileaks is that ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers that manages certain top-level protocol and parameter assignments for the Internet, intervened. It did not. A little technical discussion to explain why: The domain name system (“DNS”) is hierarchical, and its zones are exclusive of one another rather than inherited (save for the lateral mirroring among the twelve root zone servers). The root zone orchestrated by ICANN is a very small file — just a mapping between each top-level domain like .org or .ch (“TLD”) and the IP address(es) of the servers designated to say more about that TLD (one server, not in ICANN’s hands, keeps track of names under .org, one for names under .ch, etc.). You can see a user-friendly version of the file here, with the Swiss name servers
