[AusNOG] [off-topic] US lawmakers bring in worldwide censorship laws

[Kim Davies]

Quoting Chris Chaundy on Tuesday September 28, 2010:
|
| While I am not sure if things have changed (I have tried deliberately
| to keep out of DNS issues for some years now), as I understand it,
| while ICANN is responsible for the root name-servers, it has this
| responsibility at the whim of the US Department of Commerce, so there
| is a lot of control there.  Sure, there are quite a number of roots or
| mirror-roots that operate outside of US borders, you can bet your life
| that the contracts to run these are as tight as all hell and with more
| DNS security appearing every day, subverting things will be a lot
| harder, but the fact is we are just talking about names here, and
| there have been proposals to set up 'alternative roots' in the past,
| and you can bet that if a law like this was passed, there would be a
| great incentive to proceed down this path.  ICANN has fought
| tooth-and-nail against such action as this would not only fragment the
| Internet name-space but it would also have drastic commercial
| implications, and as such, I think it will be unlikely that such a law
| will see the light of day.

I think alternate roots is not a constructive discussion with
respect to this proposal. If there were a domain called, lets say,
'theplundererharbour.org', to be blocked; here is what would likely happen:

   a) If it was registered through a US registrar, they would be asked to 
      take it down;
   b) If not, PIR (the registry for .ORG) would be asked to take it down
      as it is based in the US.

No amount of alternate roots is going to alter (b). The root zone only
contains delegation for top-level domains, not the second- and third-
level domains within.
 
Any alternative infrastructure that was intended to have fine-grained
control to reintroduce labels deeper down the DNS will need to replicate
the entire registry-level infrastructure of registry operators like
VeriSign with tens, if not hundreds, of millions of registrations. Short
answer is, it just aint going to happen.

It seems to me a far more likely scenario is if this kind of law was
passed and registrants of domains wanted to escape its provisions, the
first simple answer is register inside a top-level domain outside the
bill's provisions. Or, use an addressing technique not dependent on the
DNS, or fluxes faster than the legal system, and avoid the entire
thing.

kim