[governance] A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

[Bertrand de La Chapelle]

Milton,

Following your remarks to McTim below, and supposing this indeed is done
through the courts, the interesting set of questions here is :

1) Would/should a foreign registrar comply with a court order from the US ?
2) And if it failed to do so, would the court order Verisign to do it (block
the domain name) ?
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 ?

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 *personal* 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.

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.

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
?

These are deep policy issues and I'd be interested in comments on those
challenges. Because they are challenges for governments too.

Best

Bertrand




On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 12:06 AM, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: McTim [mailto:dogwallah at gmail.com]
> > In this case, the registrar took action, not the registry, so it
> > remains to be seen if a non-US .com registrar (and non-US registrant)
> > would take the same action. Probably not.
>
> The action was not taken by the registrar, the registrar complied with a
> legal order.
>
> .com is located in Virginia.
>
> > Then the question (that I
> > think you are raising) is would VRSN remove the records from the .com
> > zone in such a case.
> >
> > I would  hope not.
> >
>
> It is not up to VeriSign. It is up to the courts.
>  ____________________________________________________________
> You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
>     governance at lists.cpsr.org
> To be removed from the list, send any message to:
>     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org
>
> For all list information and functions, see:
>     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
>



-- 
____________________
Bertrand de La Chapelle
Délégué Spécial pour la Société de l'Information / Special Envoy for the
Information Society
Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et Européennes/ French Ministry of Foreign
and European Affairs
Tel : +33 (0)6 11 88 33 32

"Le plus beau métier des hommes, c'est d'unir les hommes" Antoine de Saint
Exupéry
("there is no greater mission for humans than uniting humans")
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20080307/8771d179/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance