<div>Milton,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Following your remarks to McTim below, and supposing this indeed is done through the courts, the interesting set of questions here is : </div>
<div> </div>
<div>1) Would/should a foreign registrar comply with a court order from the US ? </div>
<div>2) And if it failed to do so, would the court order Verisign to do it (block the domain name) ? </div>
<div>3) Should Verisign do it, does that mean that all .com registrants become indirectly subject to US law, not only in terms of appropriate strings, but also in terms of the very activity they run, even on servers not located on US territory and serving customers outside of the US ?</div>
<div> </div>
<div>This is a real and useful discussion. Nothing to do with the "oversight of the root" via IANA. It is exposing the core challenge of competing or overlapping jurisdictions and probably the need for some "globally-applicable public policy principles". I believe nobody has the full complete answer. In my <u>personal</u> view, this is an illustration of the mutation of sovereignty, disconnecting it from the sole physical territory and allowing it to expand in a fractal manner on other territories - or conversely, retract - depending on the influence of the corresponding national actors in the digital sphere. And those national actors are not only the governments : the existence of a dominant player in a specific domain (Verisign, but also a Google, YouTube, MySpace or Facebook) does bring the corresponding government a leverage. But it probably also gives it a special responsibility it did not have before. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>This notion of "fractal sovereignty" is harder to handle than the traditional territory-based one but probably more adapted to our connected world than the notion of strict subsidiarity : the challenge is to manage interdependence and interactions.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>To enrich the discussion, I'd like to put in perspective here the issue of IDNs. Will the physical location of the future major registries for IDN TLDs (particularly gTLDs if any) give the corresponding national courts a specific authority/legal power on all registrants in those TLDs, even if they are not located in that country and have no business with its citizens ? </div>
<div> </div>
<div>These are deep policy issues and I'd be interested in comments on those challenges. Because they are challenges for governments too. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Best</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Bertrand</div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div><br> </div>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 12:06 AM, Milton L Mueller <<a href="mailto:mueller@syr.edu">mueller@syr.edu</a>> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">
<div class="Ih2E3d">> -----Original Message-----<br>> From: McTim [mailto:<a href="mailto:dogwallah@gmail.com">dogwallah@gmail.com</a>]<br>> In this case, the registrar took action, not the registry, so it<br>> remains to be seen if a non-US .com registrar (and non-US registrant)<br>
> would take the same action. Probably not.<br><br></div>
<div class="Ih2E3d">The action was not taken by the registrar, the registrar complied with a<br>legal order.<br><br>.com is located in Virginia.<br><br>> Then the question (that I<br>> think you are raising) is would VRSN remove the records from the .com<br>
> zone in such a case.<br>><br>> I would hope not.<br>><br><br></div>It is not up to VeriSign. It is up to the courts.<br>
<div>
<div></div>
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