Fwd: [governance] Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign Registrar on behalf of US Authorities

[McTim]

As Milton said, these are not actions taken in the rootzone, but in .com

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 6:39 AM, Nicolas Adam <nickolas.adam at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

> Nicolas
>
> take a look at from ICANN's blog post "thought paper", see page 9, section
> on "chang[ing] authority for DNS. I know that dns zone files have to be
> globally accessible, so the justification for ICANN's authority assertion is
> straightforward: stability of the root. I do not think we can wiggle our way
> out by allowing zone file action that have effects constrained only in some
> jurisdiction, unless i'm mistaken.

or is the .com zone file the one you mean?


>
>
>
>
> On 3/10/2012 12:15 AM, Nicolas Adam wrote:
>>
>> Come to think of it, I guess that the gTLD expansion plan can be
>> considered somewhat of an ICANN answer to this ...
>>
>> Nicolas
>>
>> On 3/10/2012 12:06 AM, Nicolas Adam wrote:
>>>
>>> Disregarding the thorny issue that it must be done sometimes for botnet
>>> and such, and just concentrating on the
>>> political/jurisdictional/authority/flow-down-contract issue:
>>>
>>> IANA/Icann can *assert* *its* authority on the root file and say to VS
>>> something like: don't disrupt DNS connectivity in other parts of the world
>>> via changes in the root. You may safely respond to local querries within
>>> your technical capability, but this is off limit.
>>>
>>> I'm not arguing now that this would necessarily be sound policy (it would
>>> clearly be regarding IPR, less clearly with spambots), but it's got
>>> everything to do with authority assertion (or lack thereof) on the root.
>>>
>>> I will be happy to learn be being contradicted in 7 different ways.
>>>
>>> Nicolas
>>>
>>> On 3/9/2012 9:50 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I am no fan of the domain name seizures but there is an unfortunate
>>>> level of confusion about what is really at issue here.
>>>> The domain seizures imposed on VeriSign actually have nothing to do with
>>>> the fact that the US controls the authoritative root zone file. Rather, they
>>>> are allowed by the fact that the domains are registered under .com, and the
>>>> .com registry falls under US jurisdiction. We could delegate root zone
>>>> authority to the ITU, the United Nations, the IGF, Russia, China or the IGP
>>>> and it wouldn't make one bit of difference to the ability of the FBI, ICE,
>>>> or any other US authority to order Verisign to disable a second level domain
>>>> registered under .com. Only Verisign, the operator of the .com registry, can
>>>> without the consent of the registrant redirect a dns query from the
>>>> nameserver for foo.com to ice.gov.
>>>>
>>>> IANA cannot do this. ICANN cannot do this.
>>>>

-- 
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel