ICANN Wants Immunity

rprins writes "In what is perhaps a reaction to recent Homeland Security demands, a strategic report by ICANN suggests that it should take on the model of a private international organization (PDF). That would make ICANN immune from US law and regulations. However, it's unlikely that the Bush administration would grant ICANN these privileges. So the organization might opt to relocate to Switzerland where such privileges are easier to attain."

Re:Good.

[drinkypoo]

Mind you, I wouldn't trust any other country more. Independence from national issues is pretty much the only solution.

Given ICANN's checkered past, are you sure you would trust an independent ICANN?

Re:ICANN?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, lets see.

You are in charge of a company whos charter is the international community, not just the US.

Other countries are asking you for things, but as the requests come in, our wonderful US Government steps in and says they want you to do something else, because its in the best interest of the US.

Look at Bush? He wants total control over them. They want the keys to everything, so the US can again hold an international monopoly on DNS and IPs.

First, I live in US, but I'm not proud of what our government does.

In this case, the charter of ICANN says to server the international community, and I imagine HMS asking for the keys and being the only people who have them aside from ICANN is pissing off a whole lot in the international community.

ICANN in my opinion is looking at options to ensure it follows its charter - The whole community, not just the interest of one spoiled child (our wonderful country).

ICANN right now is being strangled by the US, in what it can and can't do, what decisions it makes, its just a puppet corporation with no real power waiting for the government to say "Your going to make this decision".

I say give them immunity, let them serve the international community as they were meant to do.

DNSSEC keys

[John.P.Jones]

This is all about the recent request for access to the DNSSEC root keys. As a firm proponent of DNSSEC I agree, In ACSAC 2005 I published a paper proposing the IKS (Internet Key Service) a distributed domain-name based certificate authority grounded in DNSSEC and the sole authority of ICANN to assign domains. A functionally deployed DNSSEC would allow us to bootstrap strong end-to-end cryptography. Allowing the US government to spoof DNS entries would seriously impair DNSSEC and greatly damage my work.

Re:terrible news

[mrtexe]

Switzerland has anti-hate speech laws. The US does not. Therefore, the US has more freedom of speech than Switzerland.

Without protection of US law, ICANN will be vulnerable to suit in other countries like Switzerland. Secondly, the physical location of the root servers would probably be moved to countries that also had lower-than-US freedom of expression laws. Let's say a root server was placed in the UAE. Legal pressure in that country might force the root server in that country to remove domain names from that server that the UAE government did not like, even though other root servers list them. For example, Planned Parenthood, Little Green Footballs, the ACLU, and Feminism.org. Over a period of time, you would have some chaos and a lot of repression.

I respect your opinion, but I guess I just don't agree that this would not be a plausible scenario.

Re:Its a Trap

[kimba]

VeriSign never had "ICANNs job before ICANN came along". The IANA function was operated by the University of Southern California prior to the creation of ICANN in 1998. The operation of IANA dates back to 1972, and never in that time has it been operated by VeriSign.

Re:terrible news

[A Name Similar to Di]

Every country which has ratified the UN declaration on human rights (and followed through on their obligations, for example the UK) has equal free-speech to the USA. We just have different bugbears to you (in Europe, this is mainly we-hate-Nazis instead of we-hate-Terrorists).

I know this is touching on a political nerve, so I'm hesitant to say much, but regardless of those who ratified the UN declaration, the USA has a better track record than others.

Let's start with looking at the declaration [un.org]. I believe the relevant section is article 19:
Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Sounds good. Now I'm going to use Canada as an example as I'm more familiar with them (being that they are in close proximity to the US so more of their news makes it to me). Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] mentions the following:

Due to section 1 of the Charter, the so-called limitation clause, Canada's freedom of expression is not absolute and can be limited under certain situations. Section 1 of the Charter states:

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

This section is double edged. First it implies that a limitation on freedom of speech prescribed in law can be permitted if it can be justified as being a reasonable limit in a free and democratic society. Conversely, it implies that a restriction can be invalidated if it cannot be shown to be a reasonable limit in a free and democratic society. The former case has been used to uphold limits on legislation which are used to prevent hate speech and obscenity.

This is something I can offer some anecdotal evidence on as well. There's a website called The Smoking Gun [thesmokinggun.com] that publishes police reports/mug shots/random documents from celebrity arrests and other amusing news in the United States. One of their reports each [thesmokinggun.com] year [thesmokinggun.com] is a list of porn from the US that is prohibited in their country... a testament to more permissive US laws regardless of the prevailing public opinion of such matters in the US.

More shocking to me (and I do apologize for this being anecdotal only) was a friend who visited Canada and had his computer's hard drive inspected by customs. He asked what they were looking for and was told "hate speech literature, etc". You may not believe it, but as a US resident I've never had to worry about the political contents of my computer. Further, I do have a number of Muslim friends. While some of them have voiced a concern to me that they fear government inspection in their lives (which is I believe what you were mentioning in your post) none of them actually fear imprisonment. They're more concerned with their loss of privacy and/or time wasted explaining to the government officials that they're not a problem. Now is that opinion prevailing in the US Muslim community? That I don't know and I've never seen a good poll on the subject.

Again, I'm not trying to ruffle any feathers, and I'm certainly not trying to absolve the USA of its many wrongs and problems, but free speech is something that they actually have a very good track record on. I think a lot of the XXX political "discussion" has been more posturing and catering to voters than politicians actually trying to effect change. This may sound odd, but in the US, we have many many policy decisions brought up that politicians *know ahead of time* will never come to be, how

Re:DNSSEC keys

[wkk2]

Maybe DNSSEC should only be deployed on tamper resistant hardware that doesn't allow for private key extraction. The key pair is generated internally and nobody can give up the key even if asked. A threshold code spread among multiple administrators, in different countries, could be required for any necessary updates. The administration could even be done through a trust that has dead man and duress procedures much like some tax and lawsuit protection schemes. It's sad that this might be necessary.

Re:Another organization that wants to be above the

[rs79]

"You know how animals like deer and cattle innately understand when a natural disaster is coming and instinctively seek safer ground?

It might be something like that."

More like roaches scurrying when the light is turned on.

That light of day can be a pesky thing - it makes all sorts of things visible.

ITU

[fabu10u$]

I still say it should become a function of the International Telecommunication Union. Yes, that's a UN agency, but during the Cold War their standards kept the West, the Soviets, and the Asians talking and telexing without too much politicking. (And they're located in Geneva.)