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

[Nicolas Adam]

Well I think I meant the com zone but I was under the impression - perhaps terminologically challenged, maybe worst - that the com zone was a subpart of the root zone.

N

Please excuse my mobile brevity.

-----Original Message-----
From: McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 06:52:17 
To: Nicolas Adam<nickolas.adam at gmail.com>
Cc: <NCSG-DISCUSS at listserv.syr.edu>
Subject: Re: [NCSG-Discuss] Fwd: [governance] Verisign seizes .com domain
 registered via foreign Registrar on behalf of US Authorities

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