[governance] today's Wash Post editorial

Sat Jan 26 01:02:10 EST 2013

Norbert,

"Maybe a constructive way to take this discussion forward would be to
ask ourselves: What reforms of the UN would we insist are necessary
before we would consider it acceptable to make ICANN a UN agency?"

And how to achieve them, as well? Multistakeholder General Assembly dealing with domain names, AAAA records and glue over IPv6, spam, hunger, the bellicous situation in Mali, nuclear disarmament?

And world peace? Do we include that in the agenda as well or leave it to the Sandra Bullock Council? 

Yours,

Alejandro Pisanty

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     Dr. Alejandro Pisanty
Facultad de Química UNAM
Av. Universidad 3000, 04510 Mexico DF Mexico

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Blog: http://pisanty.blogspot.com
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________________________________________
Desde: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org [governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] en nombre de Norbert Bollow [nb at bollow.ch]
Enviado el: viernes, 25 de enero de 2013 17:04
Hasta: governance at lists.igcaucus.org; McTim
CC: Koven Ronald; parminder at itforchange.net
Asunto: Re: [governance] today's Wash Post editorial

McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:
> > warrant. The scenario is this: "ICE decides that one foreign TLD
> > registrar
>
> I think you mean "registry"  here.
Yes.
>  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)
>
> neither to the IANA operator or rootzone maintainer.
>
> As they did in the rojadirecta case, they would go to the registry
If the registry is outside the US, like Rojadirecta was, how would they
"go to the registry"?

> So you are hypothesizing that if for example ICE took exception to
> mega.nz (or mega.co.nz), they would go to ICANN or VRSN to take .nz
> from the root?

No... that's totally unplausible - .nz is too high profile and in
addition ccTLDs have at least some degree of protection against this
kind of scenario on the basis of para 63 of the Tunis agenda.

But what if one of the new gtlds were considered by ICE to be "rogue"
in the sense of attracting a high percentage of websites violating the
US understanding of what copyright law should say, and being
unresponsive to US takedown demands?

For example, .gratis has two applicants, one in the US and one outside.
Suppose the non-US applicant wins .gratis, and the domain then attracts
lots of gratis services which are legal in the country where
the .gratis registry is based but in violation of the US understanding
of what "intellectual property law" should be like.

In such a scenario I could imagine ICE trying to get .gratis out of the
root zone.

> Neither body acting alone (or in conceert with each other could
> accomplish that.  They would both tell ICE (politely) to bugger off,
> that what ICE wants they can't have, as it is not possible for either
> party to complete the request.

Sorry I don't follow you here.

If they serve Verisign a warrant that says: "Effective tomorrow, all
servers which you operate that serve copies of the root zone shall serve
copies that have the entries for the '.gratis' domain deleted", how
could Verisign argue that they're unable to comply? (They could, quite
reasonably, argue that the request is unwise, and that quite
possibly the only result is for the US to massively lose trust and
goodwill. In fact, due to the likely inability of Verisign to get the
modified root zone signed in a way that the worldwide technical
community would respect, that argument would be much stronger than the
equivalent argument would have been for rojadirecta.com, if they had
made that argument there. As far as I know they didn't, so they have
already demonstrated their willingness to comply with this kind of
warrants. Anyway, assuming the demand is phrased in a way that makes it
possible for Verisign to comply, I wouldn't bet anything on Verisign
refusing to comply. The case of a warrant served to ICANN is marginally
more complicated but I think essentially equivalent unless NTIA
exercises its oversight function to stop the madness before Verisign
would act on it.

> > 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.
>
> right, and the point I was making is that this thread has been mostly
> about rootzone changes, and you brought in rojadirecta, 2 things which
> really have little in common.

Note though that I have not been replying to you but to Koven Ronald
who had written, in a message that did not explicitly reference any of
your postings:
: In what, precisely, does the "yoke of US's oversight" consist ?
: May we have concrete examples, please, of the exercise of this
: yoke ? It has seemed to me for some time that the obsession with
: getting rid of the Americans is a reflex built on a prejudice,
: rather than a reflection of experienced reality, at least as
: concerns Internet governance as such.

I agree that Rojadirecta is not an example of rootzone changes. It is
however an example of experienced reality. An experienced reality where
I would expect culturally sensitive Americans to understand that this
kind of thing will likely trigger a reaction, especially if those who
are reacting (not only to this instance of extraterritorial abuse of
US government power, but to the whole pattern of such abuses) are then
accused of being prejudiced.

> So to remove the US "yoke", we would not only need to remove the US
> role in root changes, but remove ALL registries and registrars from US
> territories AND force Google and FB, etc to relocate all of their
> offices to a country where they would not be subject to any laws??  In
> other words, a place that doesn't exist.
>
> In other words, Internetistan!!

It is definitely possible to create administrative structures that
avoid giving an exceptional role, or the appearance of exceptional power
over anything of importance, to any particular country's government.

The UN shows that this can be done.

Maybe ICANN could eventually become a "UN specialized agency"?

I'd expect that to resolve the concerns around the "yoke of US's
oversight" with regard to ICANN and the root zone.

I'd insist though that the UN would need some serious reforms first.

Maybe a constructive way to take this discussion forward would be to
ask ourselves: What reforms of the UN would we insist are necessary
before we would consider it acceptable to make ICANN a UN agency?

Greetings,
Norbert

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