[governance] People's Daily of China: US must hand over Internet control to the world

[Norbert Bollow]

David Conrad <drc at virtualized.org> wrote:
> As mentioned previously, .IQ was dysfunctional and remained so until
> a redelegation was done in 2005.  The USG did not ask ICANN to
> "terminate services" to .IQ. The folks who ran the TLD were arrested
> (in Texas, US I believe) and put into jail for violating US law (not
> a lawyer and don't know the details so won't argue whether that
> arrest was appropriate), but this is unrelated to ICANN.

According to Kieren McCarthy's article, the charges were "of dealing
illegally with a senior Hamas operative, Mousa abu Marzook, and of
illegally exporting computer equipment and technology to Libya and
Syria - described by US officials as state sponsors of terrorism".

So he was arrested for having business relationships with the Arabic
world that were allegedly illegal in the US, but which probably pretty
much everyone in the Arabic world would have considered quite
legitimate.

If this indeed effectively destroyed a ccTLD (which was active at
that time) of a country in that region, then I'm not sure whether it
matters in the grand scheme of things that the way in which this
happened was not (as falsely alleged in the Chinese propaganda article)
by means of a demand to ICANN, but by means of an arrest which I
suspect would appear from the perpective of the people in Iraq as
equally unjustifiable. I mean, if the ccTLD operator had been guilty
of something where in all countries most people would agree that it is
clearly a crime, then I'd be willing to consider the arrest and its
consequences to be clearly not something that would undermine the
trustworthiness of the US government as host country and supervisor
of ICANN. As things are, the situation is IMO much less clear -- unless
of course if as the IANA report asserts, the .IQ ccTLD was never
active, or at least it was already inactive at the time of the arrest,
than the situation would be nice and clear and the mess with the .IQ
ccTLD clearly no fault of the US government.

I think we all agree that when in China people are arrested for
exercising human rights, it does not excuse the Chinese government if
they say that these people were arrested for violating the laws of
China. We must hold our Western governments to the same standard, and
be equally careful about cases of criminal persecution that clearly
have a political component. 

Greetings,
Norbert

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