On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:20 PM, Beavis <pfu...@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
