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

[Norbert Bollow]

David Conrad <drc at virtualized.org> wrote:
> Norbert,
> > 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?

I'm not sure that I really want to go as far as suggesting that, but
I'm also realizing that some of the thoughts I've been exploring and
throwing around here recently might have that kind of demand as their
logical conclusion. Right now the objective of my musings is simply to
try to see issues also from non-Western sides which are foreign to me.
I think that it's too simplistic to just say that the Chinese article
is propaganda and contains factual errors, therefore its perspective
can be entirely ignored. After all, I also don't think that it would
be right to just ignore the perspective of the US government on ITU
and multistakeholder Internet governance, even though from that
direction there is also propaganda coming with its own factual errors.
And I still suspect that the assertion in that IANA report about
the .IQ ccTLD never having been active (with the convenient logical
consequence that there is no need to even discuss whether continuity is
offered to the 2LDs under the new ccTLD delegation arrangement) may also
be a factual error.

Back to the question of whether I might want to suggest that some kind
of diplomatic immunity could make sense, if at all I'd probably want to
make that kind of proposal only for the case of TLDs (and other CIR
administrators, e.g. dns root server operators) based in a country that
is not the US, and for visits to the US in direct connection with that
CIR administrator role. The procedure could be that ICANN might issue a
special letter of invitation to attend a particular meeting or other
event organized by ICANN, and this letter of invitation would grant the
recipient the right to be allowed to enter the US, attend the event,
and leave again, without fear of persecution on the basis of any non US
based activities of the invitee.

Maybe the introduction of such a special kind of diplomatic immunity for
"foreign critical Internet resource administrators", as part of an
International treaty that also gives ICANN (including the IANA function)
immunity from the kinds of potential US government demands that would
internationally be seen as unreasonable, could make a significant
contribution towards addressing international fears and concerns, both
for fears and concerns that concern purely imaginary threats
and for fears and concerns about actual risks.

I think we all agree that "the US government might cause the Internet
to suddenly stop working in China" is not a realistic concern at all,
even if the People's Daily of China article seems to indicate that
there is significant fear of that in China, and such fear is a reality
in itself.

On the other hand I wonder if the following is perhaps a realistic
scenario: Would it be possible, in the absence of any kind of
diplomatic immunity, for a TLD operator to be arrested during a short
visit to the US on charges of aiding and abetting copyright
infringement, when the offense consists in not taking action against
2LDs which are used in online activities that violate US copyright law
(but not the national laws in the country where the TLD operator is
based, which implement international copyright law differently than
the US)?

Greetings,
Norbert

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