[RAA-WG] [At-Large] Open letter to ICANN

[Neil Schwartzman]

On 7-Apr-09, at 8:45 AM, Vittorio Bertola wrote:

> However, I concur with the letter that the WDPRS is a useless service
> that appears to have been deployed more as a token effort than for  
> real.
> I think it should just be dropped - if people suspect that a website  
> is
> doing fraud, they should call the police, not ICANN. If there is the
> need for cross-national cooperation, the various polices should just  
> do
> their job and get organized to cooperate quickly and effectively. If
> there are countries that do not cooperate, then this is definitely a
> matter for national diplomacies to sort out - the US was able to  
> impose
> its flavour of intellectual property regulation to the whole world
> through TRIPs and bilateral agreements, don't tell me that it is not
> strong enough to get cooperation on cybercrime.

I would argue that they didn't, and in terms of cybercrime, the U.S.  
has one of the weakest anti-spam laws, written by marketers, on the  
books.

There is plenty of work being done for x-border cooperation, in venues  
such as MAAWG.org and londonactionplan.org but in certain situations  
such as eastern Europe there is strong evidence of cooperative  
ventures between cyber criminals and government; I've seen credible  
reports linking the cyber-attack on Georgia, concurrent with the first  
bombs dropping, which were attributed to two Botnet herders. So were  
they in cahoots with the Russian military? Maybe. If so, getting them  
taken down when they have friends with nuclear weapons might be a tad  
difficult.

The dismissive attitude of the Chinese government to last week's cyber- 
spying reports is another case in point.

Your argument is a strawman, I too do not advocate ICANN's  
indiscriminate involvement in take-downs because a site collects data  
in an insecure manner, or due to an erroneous postal code, and I don't  
know anyone who advocates for such things.

There is a role to be played in some particularly egregious  
situations, and in fact, all roads lead to Rome. There are, in some  
cases, no-where else to turn BUT ICANN.

What we have seen in the one case of a shut-down last year was  
particularly unsatisfying, when the assets of Registrar owned by a  
criminal were sold to his business associate.

I'm sure ICANN can do better, and certainly from those whom i met in  
Mexico, I got the impression that there is political will to do so.

--
Neil Schwartzman
Executive Director
CAUCE: The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial
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