[NA-Discuss] Unrest continues to be met with Internet lockdown

Evan Leibovitch evan at telly.org
Wed Feb 16 18:36:02 UTC 2011


On 16 February 2011 12:41, Marc Rotenberg <rotenberg at epic.org> wrote:


> This issue is not going away. ALAC should develop a position.
>


Agreed, but for this to be relevant for ICANN I would like to make such a
position both broader and more specific:

- broader in the sense that government meddling in the DNS goes beyond high
profile umbrella Internet shutdowns, and definitely beyond the one-time
circumstance in Egypt. Targeted, ongoing, content-related seizing of domains
in the US (see other threads here related to COICA etc) also pose a
substantial threat to the stability of the namespace. But this is not
limited to the US; in ways this is just a continuing threat that includes
existing filtering of domains in China and official blockage of the.il ccTLD
in some Mideast countries.

- more specific in that ICANN is not about all things to do with Internet
governance. If our message is going to carry weight it has to directly
address, and limit itself to, ICANN's own mandate. I would feel far more
comfortable being part of an alliance on this that also perhaps includes
ISOC and IGF, because they have the scope to address issues that are beyond
our specific focus. (This is why I encouraged linkage with the ISOC
statement on Egypt).

We do have something to contribute. ICANN *claims* its actions to be
independent of domain content, yet its shameful meddling in the .xxx issue
(which ALAC opposed) set a poor precedent which I fear will be exploited
again.

I would escalate this beyond NARALO, though, for this is hardly a North
American regional issue.

- Evan



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