[At-Large] Libya terminating unacceptable .ly domains

Karl Auerbach karl at cavebear.com
Fri Oct 8 08:00:50 UTC 2010


On 10/08/2010 12:10 AM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:

> You speak as if this hasn't already started.

Indeed.

The recent brouhaha about .xxx was driven in large part by some very 
conservative religious groups in the US who lobbied the Bush 
administration which, in turn, put pressure on the US Dep't of Commerce, 
who, in turn ... well, we all saw the results.

But the net has never been seamless.  My private net is not open to 
everyone.  I would suspect that pretty much everyone's home net is 
closed to outsiders.  Corporate and military chunks of the net are also 
pretty well closed up.

It is a fantasy that the net ever was, is, or will be an open field in 
which everyone can contact anyone and in which anyone can prance freely 
to any part.

The end-to-end principle is a fading aspiration, not a reflection of 
present or past reality.

And the chunking of the net is happening in many ways beyond DNS.  IPv6 
is going to chop the net into two distinct nets running side-by-side. 
NATs and Application Level Gateways carve us up further.  Rules that 
require or deny cryptography (e.g. the Blackberry mess) are going to 
divide us in yet another dimension.  Private interconnects are going to 
create a caste system in which large corporate interests will be able to 
provide their most favored users with a better internet experience than 
received by the independent internet user.

The dimensionality of separations is increasing even more - for 
instance, those who refuse to use Facebook are divided from those who 
do.  Yesterday's XKCD drawing of the continents and nations of the net 
is very illustrative of the growing boundaries.

My own sense is that rather than wringing hands over the divisions that 
we ought to aspire to create processes and institutions that show how 
those divisions are not merely silly but also counterproductive and 
ultimately ineffective.


> Then we must allow hundreds of gTLDs to blossom in their place :-)

Yes!!!  (But why merely hundreds?  I'll raise you by 2 decimal orders of 
magnitude a year. ;-)

	--karl--



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