[governance] today's Wash Post editorial

[Norbert Bollow]

McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 6:04 PM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> > McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> 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"?
> 
> the registries were in the U.S. in the rojadirecta case!!

That's exactly the point.

In the Rojadirecta case, the US government wanted to take action
against a Spanish company that was acting in a way that was legal in
Spain. But rojadirecta.com needs entries in a dns zone (specifically,
the .com zone) maintained by a US company (Verisign). So the US
government served Verisign with a warrant that had the effect of
disabling rojadirecta.com.

In the hypothetical, a gtld registry, say for .gratis, is outside the
US, operating legally under the rules of the country where it is
based, but the US government comes to the conclusion that the business
of that gtld registry consists to a significant part in benefiting from
infringements on "intellectual property rights" of US corporations. In
that kind of situation, I'd definitely expect the US government to at
least consider serving a warrant intended to disable .gratis to whoever
in their view is in charge of maintaining the root zone! 

As the number of gtlds will be increasing dramatically, maintenance of
the root zone will become much more like operating a registry than it
used to be. And I'm not aware of any reason to assume that the US
government wouldn't expect to have at least the same kind of rights with
regard to the root zone that they successfully exercised with regard
to the .com zone.  

Greetings,
Norbert

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