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

Marc Rotenberg rotenberg at epic.org
Sun Jan 30 22:36:45 UTC 2011


It sounds as if we are gathering the material of a good statement!

We might look beyond the current  problems in Egypt and speak 
more broadly about how ICANN should respond when any country 
seeks to limit Internet access.

One other consideration: we need a way to express this position
that is understandable to the non-expert, i.e. recognizing ICANN's
formal technical competences, a position of ALAC should still
be readily understandable to a typical Internet user.

Marc.


On Jan 30, 2011, at 5:24 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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