Net-Neutrality or Net-Neutered?

Wed Dec 15 05:38:36 UTC 2010

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:20 PM, Beavis <pfunix at gmail.com> wrote:
> I come across this interesting link.
> http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p=4828&tag=nl.e036
> Is ICANN really that susceptible to govt. pressure?
> I only see chaos ahead specially with ipv6 coming into the scene.

ICANN is subject to government pressure, but not in the way suggested;
 it should
be obvious fairly quickly if the ICANN board creates new policies
requiring registrars to provide
a technical means to censor domains governments object to on request.
It is possible that ICANN could create something like a UDRP for
government censorship,
but I don't see a public draft for that yet anyways.

ICANN is not the registrar of any domains or the registrar operator of
the gTLDs,
so ICANN lacks direct operational technical capability to "turn off"
domains or implement
government censorship;  even if ICANN staff wished to do so.

Registrars  and Registrar operators may be subject to government pressure,
in the form of law enforcement requests or court orders that they change contact
records and DNS records for a registered domain in the database that
they are publishing
on their set of servers that have the special status of globally
recognized TLD server.

Just in the same way a court could issue an order to a RBL service to
add  (or remove)
IP addresses from their  community-recognized blacklist, against an
RBL operator's will.

For most gTLD domains, the registrar would be the weakest link in the chain.

Many registrars have a clause in the registration agreement that
states something such as
"You agree that we may, in our sole discretion, delete or transfer
your domain name at any time."
So the registrar  not only could be pressured;  many already opened
the gate for them to respond
in the manner they like.

In the current state of affairs; Network operators concerned about
governmental interference with respect to their domains,
should register multiple domains under different TLDs  with  registrar
and registry operator in different jurisdictions.

Or understand that (yes);  DNS   can be effected by governments.
particularly content is offensive to the local government and might be
subject to censorship efforts,

--
-JH