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

[linda misek-falkoff]

Dear Bertrand and All:

Indeed Issues of *virtual geography* abound (I  think of this when reading
Michael's enriching community posts, and as early as a few decades ago (in
litigation) encountered e.g. in online defamation cases and whether judges
consider that they have jurisdiction - can bring cases into their courtroom
(or, that is, wish to).

My experience in courts is that the reach of the court is pretty narrowly
construed in the USA as compared with some *physical) places in Europe, at
least (and still) with currently seated judges, but jurisdiction is a HUGE
issue.  Glad to read the posts here, though at a slant with
*CyberLibel,*CyberStalking, e-IdentityTheft, or other aspects of
Reputation Management,
etc.. But however enumerated, these legal sub-domains are included in *Human
Rights* concerns, as are many commonly embedded otherwise in
*Development*discussions. Can
*Security* be far b ehind?

I hope we'll find a place at Conferences for all of these inter and intra
cultural considerations,  regarding one region's influence over others,
wherever in the *spatial/temporal* world they may be..

Just some thoughts from here on current and quite interesting discourse,
With very best wishes, LDMF.
Linda D. Misek-Falkoff, Ph.D., J.D.
*Respectful Interfaces*.
For I.D. only here: Communications Coordination Committee For the U.N.


On 3/7/08, Bertrand de La Chapelle <bdelachapelle at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
> >  ____________________________________________________________
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>
>
>
> --
> ____________________
> 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")
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