[NA-Discuss] Fwd: The Internet Society on Egypt’s Internet shutdown

[Gareth Shearman]

I agree that now we at least have a thread that we can pursue.

I support anything that can be done to explore technical rather than political interventions.

Gareth


On 2011-01-30, at 2:24 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:

> On 30 January 2011 16:48, Avri Doria <avri at ella.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>>> From all the report I have seen, the cut was not related to the DNS.  So
>> names, and hence the GNSO/NCUC would seem to have little to say.
>> 
>> However, while routing is not specifically in ICANN's scope, making
>> portions of the Internet address space unreachable by withdrawing routes,
>> might just be within its scope, i.e IP addresses and AS numbers.  This would
>> certainly seem to be related to core value:
>> 
>> 1. Preserving and enhancing the operational stability, reliability,
>> security, and global interoperability of the Internet.
>> 
>> Egyptian actions went against ICANN's core value number 1.
>> 
> 
> OK, now we're getting somewhere.
> 
> Marc, it appears Avri may have directly addressed your issue, and overcome
> at least part of my objection.
> 
> Indeed, At-Large has the ability to comment on all aspects of ICANN, while
> the GNSO is limited to just certain bits of it. Certainly the Egyptian act
> contravened ICANN's own Core Value #1. So it is within scope of things ICANN
> oversees.
> 
> At issue, then, is what ICANN can and should realistically to about this. I
> still have a personal issue with issuing statements devoid of action, and
> ICANN already has complex and IMO fragile relationships with both
> governments and CC domain registries. Most certainly ICANN was silent during
> similar Internet blockage activity in Iran less than two years ago.
> 
> ICANN has near-zero diplomatic credibility but very strong technical
> credibility (which is IMO the way it *should* be). So its ability to
> persuade using principled statements is very very low. But is there anything
> it can do a a technical level?
> 
> In this realm the issues get far above my head very quickly, but amongst the
> possible topics that might surround this:
> 
>   - better support for emergency routing using alternative Internet
>   communications techniques, over both high-tech (ie, satellite) and low-tech
>   (ie, telephone or Internet-over-ham-radio) approaches to circumvent blocking
>   mechanisms
>   - Emergency planning to enable quick reaction in such circumstances and
>   provide backup Internet access using the above-mentioned (and other)
>   technologies.
>   - more redundancy routing to impede blocking attempts
> 
> I'm at a loss thinking of others, but there are lots of smart people in this
> group who have been thinking about this longer and harder than I.
> 
> - Evan
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