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

[David Conrad]

Norbert,

On Aug 21, 2012, at 10:45 AM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> According to Kieren McCarthy's article, the charges were "of dealing illegally with a senior Hamas operative,

As mentioned, I'm not a lawyer and don't know the details, so won't comment other than to say that if you live or do business in a country (and are not subject to diplomatic immunity), you are generally bound by the laws of that country even if you don't agree that those laws or their interpretation are correct/appropriate. If you do not like this, your chances of being arrested are increased if you don't work/live in that country.

> If this indeed effectively destroyed a ccTLD 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 by means of a demand to ICANN, but by means of an arrest which Isuspect would appear from the perpective of the people in Iraq as equally unjustifiable.

In the grand scheme of things perhaps not, but in the context of asserting that the USG directed ICANN to "terminate services" as evidence of US hegemonic efforts to maintain control of the Internet (or whatever propaganda is being pushed), I'd argue it does matter.

Elashi was living/working in Texas and (arguably) violated US law. US law enforcement arrested him.  The USG did not instruct ICANN to do anything regarding .IQ as far as I am aware.

> 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 still don't see why the activity of the domain matters.  From IANA's perspective, a ccTLD is considered a sovereign resource and IANA staff will not take action unless/until the TLD administrators make a request and that request is established to be in the best interests of the Internet community within that country.  This holds true regardless of the number of domains registered in the TLD (or even if the TLD is known to be misconfigured -- a source of some controversy). As far as I am aware, the USG has never violated this principle and demanded IANA take action.

> 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. 

You are suggesting that TLD admins be granted the equivalent of diplomatic immunity if they are working/living in the US?

Regards,
-drc


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