[At-Large] R: R: Is ICANN's oversight really moving away from the US government?

parminder parminder at itforchange.net
Sat Apr 9 04:54:55 UTC 2016



On Friday 08 April 2016 04:54 AM, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:
> Snip......You're absolutely correct. And the only "seizures" that were
> requested, were those of Top Level Domains:
> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28582478 There are many other
> sources that describe the case in detail. The judge sided with ICANN
> in saying that "they are not property subject to attachment under
> District of Columbia Law". In this case, it is actually a good thing
> that the case had to go in front of a US court since jurisprudence
> already existed. Kindest regards, Olivier 

You are describing a case where a private party sought seizure of a
ccTLD (Iranian) on quite dubious grounds.... You are not willing to
discuss all the cases in which domain names were seized through orders
to the registries.....  You are not ready to respond to the question on
what would happen if a closed business gTLD is similarly brought to a US
court, in which case ICANN ittself is the registry, as Verisign etc were
registries for .com, etc, and thus the party to which earlier orders
were directed. Any order for gTLD seizures would clearly be directed at
ICANN. And the latter has no protection against it.

The Iranian ccTLD case that you cite was dismissed inter alia with the
argument that this ccTLD involved service to a wider community and thus
the asked for action will be disproportionate  (Although in earlier
cases assets of banks and other service companies similarly servicing a
wider community have been seized).. This argument does not apply for a
gTLD used exclusively by a business, which business a US court may be
ready to punish for it being offending to it in some way.

Why the oversight transition process would want to go into such
elaborate stress tests involving rather unlikely future scenarios where
all governments (including the US and its allies) would gang together
against some ICANN decision, but simply refuse to do a stress test for
an extremely likely (actually, inevitable) future scenario in which the
ICANN, as a US organisation, will be directed to remove a  foreign gLTD
by a US agency, most likely a court, for which evidence of closely
parallel actions exist, and in huge amounts...... (And yes, the demand
for such a stress test was made, but never responded to.)

Does this not clearly show how the whole process is rigged? ... . Does
one need a better proof?

But that is less surprising to me, what is much more is that this public
interest civil society group - ALAC - wants to maintain a studied
silence in the subject..

parminder




More information about the At-Large mailing list