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

[Evan Leibovitch]

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