Steve, On Dec 1, 2010, at 3:35 PM, Steven Bellovin wrote: >> Wouldn't this simply change the focus of who can attack from the USG (which, >> as far as I am aware, has not attacked the root) to some other government >> (or worse, the UN)? Given a handle, folks are going to want to grab it when >> they feel a need to control, regardless of who the folks are. It'd be nice >> to remove the handle, but that appears to be a very hard problem... >> > I think that the Pirate Bay announcement was triggered by > http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131678432
Which is, of course, unrelated to ICANN (see http://domainincite.com/icann-had-no-role-in-seizing-torrent-domains/) and is a result of VeriSign following US law in the management of two of the top-level domains they operate. > plus the COICA bill (http://www.eff.org/coica) Yeah, COICA is a barrel of fun. As is LOPPSI-2 in France and the equivalent regulations in places like Sweden, Germany, etc. However, my impression (but will admit not having looked into this very much) is that the guy from Pirate Bay is merely pissed off because he lost a UDRP complaint when he obtained the IFPI.COM domain after the International Federation of the Phonograph Industry let it expire, misunderstood (perhaps purposefully) what happened at VeriSign, and decided to capitalize on it. > That said, I think the problem is primarily political, not technical. Right, but that wasn't what I was questioning. I suspect that no matter what legal venue you put something as tasty as the "control of the DNS", there will be folks who will attempt to exercise that control for their own political purposes. Even internationalizing it doesn't seem to be a good idea to me (based on my impression of how politics get involved in places like the ITU). I'd love to see a non-hierarchical naming system that didn't suck more than the DNS, but as I said, it seems that's a very hard problem... Regards, -drc
