[governance] today's Wash Post editorial

[Norbert Bollow]

McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 1:16 PM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> > Koven Ronald <kovenronald at aol.com> wrote:
> >
> >> In what, precisely, does the "yoke of US's oversight" consist ? May
> >> we have concrete examples, please, of the exercise of this yoke ?
> >
> > One example is the Rojadirecta case, in which U.S. Immigration and
> > Customs Enforcement (ICE) took down, by means of a simple warrant
> > (obtained domestically within the U.S. without any need to involve
> > Spanish authorities), a Spanish website directed at customers in
> > Spain even though that website had been judged, by Spanish courts,
> > to be legal according to Spanish law.
> 
> You are conflating 2 entirely different things.
> 
> One is the role that NTIA has in re: rootzone authorisation.
> 
> The other has nothing to do with ICANN.

The US government has multiple roles and potential roles in relation to
the rootzone. One is the NTIA (National Telecommunications and
Information Administration) role in rootzone authorisation. Another
is that both ICANN and Verisign Inc. are incorporated in the US and
(since there is no special international statute that would exempt
them) thereby obligated, if served the same kind of warrant that
took Rojadirecta down, to obey the warrant. The scenario is this: "ICE
decides that one foreign TLD registrar is in the business of directing
users to websites violating the US understanding of what copyright
law should say, and further decides to treat that TLD registrar
analogously to how Rojadirecta was treated". I don't pretend to know
whether ICE would seek to serve the warrant to be served to ICANN (as
IANA operator) or Verisign (as root zone maintainer) or both, nor
whether NTIA might somehow intervene to stop the madness. I also don't
pretend to know how realistic or unrealistic that kind of scenario
might be. Furthermore, I also don't pretend to have even a guesstimate
about how many of the root server operators would thereafter actually
serve the modified root zone (in which the TLD is missing which is in
this scenario the subject of that warrant).

The only point that I was trying to make is that the concerns about
potential actions of the US government are not mere prejudice, but are
based, at least to some extent, on actual actions of the US government.

Greetings,
Norbert

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