[governance] "Oversight"

[John Curran]

On Jun 3, 2012, at 1:49 PM, Fouad Bajwa wrote:

> Going back to an earlier discussion and announcement by ICANN that it
> was not party to domain name seizures, verisign was, who does verisign
> signs its contracts with? Isn't ICANN partially a member of that
> process? Did ICANN step into protect the rights of the domains that
> its stakeholder is distributing? Do read the comments by the readers
> at the end of the post.
> 
> http://blog.icann.org/2010/12/icann-doesn%E2%80%99t-take-down-websites/

Fouad - 

 Yes, it does appear that the US government impacted domain names
 based on certain law enforcement activities.  It appears also that 
 the action was effected by some form of legal orders to Verisign,
 which is located within the US.  Such orders pose significant issues
 when they amount to actions against infrastructure for purposes of
 content control, and doubly so when they impact parties are outside
 of the legal jurisdiction doing the ordering.   I don't think there
 are many in the Internet governance community who aren't concerned 
 with the above, although some would carve out allowing enforcement 
 actions against infrastructure for aiding of their favorite cause 
 (copyright protection, preventing child exploitation, pursuing 
 anti-terrorism, etc.), and either with or without judicial review...

 However, none of this is related to ICANN, in that you could have 
 replaced ICANN with "World_DNS_NGO" and put it under a contract 
 issued by a hypothetical Internet Power Union (a new multilateral
 treaty organization), and that would not have altered the outcome 
 in the slightest...  US law enforcement would still have issued an 
 order to a US company to perform takedowns of certain DNS names.  
 To suggest that ICANN has some fault here is to ascribe to ICANN 
 some very serious duties, i.e. that ICANN must somehow to be able
 to prevent a government from engaging in its own perceived lawful 
 enforcement actions against organizations within its own borders.

> And here is a list of websites pulled down in lieu of season's sales
> in the US last year. I wonder how many governments were consulted on
> this matter at ICANN or with its stakeholders and made public before
> the action was taken or is it that this authority doesn't have to
> consult any stakeholder? Oh no one indeed since its a US IPR issue and
> no one else has anything to do with their jurisdiction?

 Again, your issue is that (in general) nation states feel that 
 it is acceptable for various reasons to directly impact Internet 
 infrastructure to protect certain policy objectives.  Getting 
 governments not to do this at all, or even not to do this for
 specific reasons (freedom of speech, copyright enforcement, etc.)
 is a very challenging task and I wish you enormous luck with it;
 it is, however, a problem which lies far above ICANN's role today
 of technical coordination and its particular USG relationship.

FYI,
/John

Disclaimers:  My views alone. No subpoenas were issued in the preparation 
of this email. Special notice for attentive governments: the author of 
this email is unaware of any infringing content, but if found otherwise 
asks that his message be deleted in preference to domain name seizure of
the archive web site...




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