[governance] Could the U.S. shut down the internet?

[Karl Auerbach]

On 02/04/2011 12:05 AM, Fouad Bajwa wrote:
> The question remains, in case of any country or website not complying
> to what the US approves, will face a shutdown?

If one objects strongly enough to US (or any other country) hegemony 
over the DNS root then there is a clear technical answer:

   - Start your your root, populate it with pointers to your favorite 
TLDs (including TLDs not recognized by ICANN)

That does *not* deal with the current issue, which is US (or any other 
country) sitting on top of a registry to get that registry to alter a 
record within a TLD.

In that case there are a couple of options:

   - Utilize the legal and political systems within that country to ask 
whether it is adhering to things like is constitutional requirements of 
due process and its rules of jurisdiction.

    Also ask a question that is rarely asked: does the government body 
that is doing the sitting on the registry have the authority to do that? 
  Here in the US things like ICE are administrative agencies that have 
only those powers given to them by legislation enacted by Congress or 
via treaty or via an Executive order; and all of those must meet 
constitutional limitations.  Does ICE have the power via legistlation to 
sit on a registry to answer a trademark complaint that is cast in terms 
of in import that violates a US trademark?  In this case the answer is 
probably "yes".  But does the US Dep't of Commerce or NTIA have the 
legislative or other source of authority to ask for a trademark based 
"kill switch" or even to charter an ICANN?  With regard to the latter 
question the US Congress' own GAO has *twice* said "we can't find any."

   - With a bit of technical juggling one could use either DNS proxies 
or packet inspection/alteration to patch-back any data that was altered 
by the registry.  I would recommend against this, however, as it is 
probably going to end up a very deep swamp populated with very hungry 
techno-crocodiles.

   - Ask whether you can legally clone the TLD.  If you can, or if you 
are willing to pay $$ for the right to make a clone, then you can set up 
your own version of the TLD.  Again, I do not like that approach as it 
tends to violate my own rule that says that if a TLD exists then the 
data in that TLD ought to be consistent and that users should shun any 
TLDs that are in dispute and give different answers to the same query.

There is another answer to all of this - which is to consider new name 
systems for the internet.  I personally find this approach attractive, 
particularly given that DNS fails terribly with regard to persistence 
and does readily handle the kind of replication and proximity that 
obtain with application entities living in "the cloud".  But unlike 
others, I advocate retention of DNS names and the DNS system as the 
tokens and machinery upon which such new naming systems (plural) would 
be based.

I'd also strongly urge that one consider in those yet-to-be-invented 
systems that one clearly face the question whether the names should 
carry human semantic meaning - we all know the dangers that arise when 
human semantics are introduced.

		--karl--


		--karl--



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