Countries Don't Own Their Internet Domains, ICANN Says 113
angry tapir writes The Internet domain name for a country doesn't belong to that country — nor to anyone, according to ICANN. Plaintiffs who successfully sued Iran, Syria and North Korea as sponsors of terrorism want to seize the three countries' ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) as part of financial judgments against them. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees the Internet, says they can't do that because ccTLDs aren't even property.
Identifiers (Score:5, Insightful)
Until this nonsense about keyword TLDs, TLDs were just identifiers, not property as ICANN noted. But this custom TLD nonsense is going to throw a wrench into that.
I could see seizing the domain registrars, but as they say, how do you seize an identifier? That's like saying I "own" the variable "x", and that all graphics programmers now need to pay me to lease use of that variable name.
Re:Identifiers (Score:5, Informative)
That's like saying I "own" the variable "x", and that all graphics programmers now need to pay me to lease use of that variable name.
Because that's never happened before. [slashdot.org]
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That's like saying I "own" the variable "x", and that all graphics programmers now need to pay me to lease use of that variable name.
Next story: "Some idiot tries to patent the variable "x" and USPTO obliges."
Re: Identifiers (Score:1)
Re:Identifiers (Score:5, Insightful)
The part where someone apparently doesn't understand the difference between a name and the thing itself, and that the thing itself doesn't always "own" its name.
Seizing Iran's TLD as part of a judgement against Iran makes exactly as much sense as seizing the assets of the Iranian American Society of Engineers and Architects [iasea.org], solely on the basis that it contains the word "Iran" in its name.
As TFA specifically points out, seizing ".ir" doesn't just affect the government of Iran. It affects thousands (millions?) of privately-owned subdomains. Imagine enforcing the same ruling against the US - Not just talking about ".us", but pretty much the entire set of legacy TLDs. Does it make sense that "amazon.com" suddenly belongs to some litigious asshat because of the inadequacy of US foreign policy? And as TFA also points out, ICANN doesn't even have the ability to do this unilaterally (they only directly control root server L), and trying to do so could well trigger as schism.
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...
that's why a naval blockade is a terrorist act of war, and why Japan was justified in attacking Pearl Harbor
A naval blockade is indeed an act of war. I guess you threw the word "terrorist" in there because - you like to abuse what words mean?
But the U.S. had imposed no naval blockade on Japan before the Pearl Harbor attack. The U.S. had halted U.S. trade with Japan in oil and scrap metal (but nothing else), but this is not what the word "blockade" means. A blockade is using armed force to prevent shipping (or other forms of transport) from third parties from getting entering the blockaded nation. Nothing like tha
Re:Identifiers (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Identifiers (Score:1)
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Typical U.S. bashing aside, I don't know why the parent was modded down. I don't particularly like the idea of the internet being controlled by ANY country (or group of countries), but the thought of a country like France or Germany having ANY say in what is or is not allowed on the internet scares me way more than any U.S. bullshit.
This is the same EU, mind you, that has already forced Google and other search engines to erase sections of the internet just because some individual didn't like what was being
The bashing is sometimes justified... (Score:5, Interesting)
I will attempt to address your points objectively, for whatever it is worth.
Firstly, bashing the EU for restricting free communication on the Internet is considering only selective evidence. The most common limitation on free speed today is intellectual property, and by far the biggest champion of restricting the free distribution of IP is the United States, including using all kinds of diplomatic and political tools to push the US agenda extra-jurisdictionally. The US also imposes other restrictions and censorship on-line that are not universal elsewhere in the world, for example in relation to gambling, and again has a track record of pushing its agenda extra-territorially through sometimes dubious mechanisms. I think right now a few people in the US are just feeling aggrieved because inevitably the rest of the world has started pushing back and expecting the US to comply with the rules from other places in the same way, instead of enjoying nothing but one-way traffic as it often has until quite recently.
Secondly, even if anywhere in the world did truly protect absolutely free speech, not all of us think that would be an improvement. For example, in much of Europe concepts like privacy and protecting personal data carry far more weight than they generally do in the US. In fact, it is illegal to export personal data from Europe to the US without special measures being used, because by default the US doesn't meet even our minimal legal standards for respecting individuals' privacy and personal data. But issues like free speech, privacy, anonymity or pseudonymity, and democracy are fundamentally interdependent and sometimes conflict, even before you consider more specific related issues like national security, policing, or copyright.
Finally, just as an aside, the recent "right to be forgotten" debate was triggered by a specific court case, and the rationale behind the decision is actually quite sensible. Again, there is now a fundamental tension between, on the one hand, benefitting from the free and open communication afforded by the Internet and from the ability to search for and access information on many subjects more easily than ever before, and on the other hand, preserving legal principles around justice, the protection of the innocent, and the rehabilitation of the guilty that have evolved over a long period in every civilised country of the world. The result in this particular case may seem at odds with technological reality, but that doesn't mean the principle or the logic are flawed, just that it isn't a good final solution yet. Your characterisation is also inaccurate, by the way, but I'll invite you to read some of the ample material that has been published about why the common misunderstanding you've described is wrong rather than getting sidetracked any further here.
There are no easy answers to any of these issues, but one thing is all but certain: throwing out everything our societies have learned over centuries about defending private lives and allowing people to move on from mistakes, just because a few Internet companies who have made staggering amounts of money might lose some of it if their business models were modestly inconvenienced, is not the only possible or potentially desirable way forward.
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I can also show a swastika on my U.S.-hosted site and criticize public officials without fear of ridiculously heavy-handed libel/defamation laws. And don't even get me started with the bullshit cultural and language laws in France. It's amazing anything gets done in that country at all.
Oh, I dunno; I've seen any number of sites similar to this one [unicode.org], whose information is mirrored at zillions of locations on the web, including many outside the US. There are historical and cultural reasons for including the symbols at code points 534D and 5350 in Unicode, and I doubt that anyone has ever been prosecuted for installing full Unicode charsets or lookup software on their web sites.
I haven't looked for such pages on French sites, but I'd be surprised if they don't exist (with the text in French
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This makes everything you state before and after useless.
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Many countries have concepts in law such as convictions becoming spent after a period of time, usually a few years depending on the seriousness of the offence. The conviction is still a matter of public record, but you no longer have to actively disclose it in some situations where initially you would, and in particular, it may be removed from various routine criminal records checks that are relevant to things like applying for jobs.
It is well documented that such measures promote rehabilitation and reduce
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Trying to force the internet to forget is suppressing other peoples freedom.
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Many things suppress my freedoms, sometimes including other people exercising rights of their own. As the old saying goes, your freedom to swing your fist does not trump my right not to get punched in the face. Arguably the biggest challenge of a civilised society is to establish how we will balance all of those competing interests, even when we might all agree that all of them are positive things on balance if we could consider them in isolation.
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To put it another way. Fuck your "Right to be Forgotten". This is not a right. It is demanding that other people remove information. Rights are things that should not be taken from you. Not things you demand from others.
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Unfortunately, it's clear by this point that you don't understand what the so-called "right to be forgotten" that resulted from the European Court ruling actually is -- for a start, it doesn't involve "removing knowledge from someone else", nor to my knowledge does any technology exist that could even do that if we wanted to -- so I'm not sure there's any point in continuing this discussion.
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Why not make it illegal for employers to make use of such irrelevant information?
Pragmatism.
IMHO, most of the damage that comes from people hearing negative things about someone that might be hidden by the kind of measures we're talking about doesn't come just from the information itself. It happens because something from long ago is assumed (not necessarily correctly) to still be a reliable indicator of what someone is like today, or because the information is incomplete, taken out of context, or simply inaccurate.
If we lived in a world where everyone was fair, and wouldn't jump to con
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There are no easy answers to any of these issues, but one thing is all but certain: throwing out everything our societies have learned over centuries about defending private lives and allowing people to move on from mistakes, just because a few Internet companies who have made staggering amounts of money might lose some of it if their business models were modestly inconvenienced, is not the only possible or potentially desirable way forward.
There are never any easy answers, but one thing is certain, this issue is not constrained to a few internet companies.
* Credit Reporting Bureaus (Callcredit, Equifax, Experian, CEG, Shufa)
* Educational institutions (and other information held by other Credential verification organizations)
* Background checks for Employment (including criminal and citizenship checks in the USA)
It's not clear that privacy principles are generally respected or even tolerated in these areas and mistakes you may have made often
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One thing that society has learned over centuries is that when it comes to people, history is often a leading indicator of future behavior.
Interesting assertion, but I think the word "often" rather than "always" is key here.
In fact, I think that sums up one of the main problems with this whole situation: if it turns out that the above statement isn't true in some specific case, it is all too easy to do great harm by assuming that it was. A lot of the most forceful advocates for positive change in some downtown districts are former gang members who grew up and came to understand the futility and wastefulness of the violence they took for grante
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if we can't trust society to act fairly under full disclosure, then selective disclosure is the only alternative to protect the disadvantaged.
Who exactly is disadvantaged? The person that may or may not act for their own personal self interest w/o full disclosure about another person or the person that conceals some information about themselves to prevent other people from acting in their own personal self interests?
Of course the 64-thousand dollar question is who exactly has the right to decide what information is personal enough to withhold? Certainly not the person (because they would withhold all negative information about themselves). Som
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I think it's important to remember that the court ruling that started all this did not say that anyone should be able to require information to be removed just because they didn't like it. The outcome relates to information that is "inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive". Also, it was explicitly stated that such determinations would need to be made on a case-by-case basis, balancing the individual's private life against the public interest.
In other words, what the ruling actually said, as distinct
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Okay, what is 'inadequate' (other than full disclosure)? What is 'irrelevant' about most of the information that is requested to be removed? Is information actually ever 'excessive' (e.g., TMI)? 'Inaccuracy' of course can be determined in a court (don't need DCMA-like takedowns requests for that)...
Seems like much of the information requested to be removed would be quite relevant to certain people in certain situation (although perhaps not most people in most situations)... So exactly how would such a p
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Domains and ccTLDs are not the same things.
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Nice rant but missing a few facts.
These are not domains like ICE have seized (which are analogous to post office box #xxxx) but the ccTLDs (more analogous to the zip code at the end.) Which is really a good way to grok how absurd the request is - imagine the families of the Iranians who died when the USN shot down their passenger jet sue the USA in their court systems, get a civil judgement, and then attempt to 'confiscate' the international postal codes used to route mail to the USA.
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I think the GP has a point. Why is one part of the domain name considered property but the other part isn't? It doesn't seem to be internally consistent. It feels like tortured reasoning when every other aspect of DNS is treated like property.
If TLDs aren't property, how can any entity control and regulate them? Doesn't that require the kinds of power that imply ownership?
Doesn't ICANN make money of registrars who effectively sell TLDs?
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Why is one part of the domain name considered property but the other part isn't?
Because registrants have been conveyed a transferrable "right" to their registration, which has a set of privileges which are mostly identical to property rights, other than the fact that the registry generally reserves the right to take their name from them under a UDRP dispute resolution procedure, and the registrar generally reserves the right to shut off their domain, in case they determine that there's been a terms of
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ICE, FBI, and other law enforcement agencies can only seize domains that are managed by registrars or registries in countries in which they have jurisdiction. Very easy to seize a .com or a .biz (Verisign and Neustar are both in the US,) a bit rarder to seize a .cn (unless China wants to allow them to.)
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can only seize domains that are managed by registrars or registries in countries in which they have jurisdiction
In this case, the registrant of the domain has a transferrable right to move the domain, and the registrar is acting as an agent of the registrant in maintaining their registration, AND the registry has given the registrar all the capabilities required to effect the technical aspects of the transfer on their own..
If the registry were truly looking out for the registrant's interests: they wou
Re:Of course ccTLDs are property..! (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not sure I can go along with that. No disrespect to Mr. Hanks, but, yeah, just no.
Syria (Score:5, Funny)
I think the ownership of the country of Syria is in dispute, never mind the tld domain name
Maybe it's me... (Score:5, Funny)
...but I was under the impression they all belonged to the City of London police?
One thing they could seize (Score:2)
is those countries series of tubes, and install valves on them and charge for the flow.
In other words, they could put a toll on the internet superhighway, so that each time a big truck enters that country, there's a price to be paid.
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It's not a big truck!
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It's a simile
Re: One thing they could seize (Score:3)
Interesting comparison (Score:5, Interesting)
The UK courts generate a lot of uproar in the US (and rightly so) about them overstepping their jurisdiction with regards to libel laws. There seems to be a complete lack of self-awareness when lawsuits such as these come up. The plaintiffs in this case are trying to collect their award of $109 million (from a default judgement in Rubin et al v. Islamic Republic of Iran et al,) in retribution to injuries caused by a Hamas bombing they claim was funded by Iran. Using the American courts in this way rides roughshod over other the independence of other countries.
They also tried to sue the EU for giving aid to the "terrorist sponsoring" Palestinian Authority (they lost due to diplomatic immunity). Using the courts in this way seems to have very little to do with justice and more to do with politics.
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Unfortunately as long as ICANN is under US jurisdiction, you're going to see disputes like this heading to US courts. (That said, I'm growing more and more wary of moves to internationalise the infrastructure; leaving it with the US's stewardship the least-bad option right now, even after the NSA revelations.)
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When was the last time you heard anything controversial about the UN-run ITU?
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Well, there was that attempt at a power grab for control of the Internet back in 2012 [slashdot.org] through regulatory capture mechanisms, which failed after China and Russia withdrew their support, but only after the EU [slashdot.org], US [slashdot.org], and a good chunk of the rest of the Western world (including Google [slashdot.org]) expressed condemnation of the idea.
Other than that, no controversies come to mind, though I should hope that's the case, given that they're a simple regulatory body.
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When was the last time you heard anything controversial about the UN-run ITU?
Ha-ha! You want to jand the Internet over to the people who invented X.25. Good one!
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Unfortunately as long as ICANN is under US jurisdiction, you're going to see disputes like this heading to US courts.
It's NOT icann I am concerned about.... it is the registry operators such as Verisign.
ICANN itself pretty much doesn't have any direct authority to do anything to the registration system on their own; they have to adopt a policy, or so.
ICANN could be further mitigated if internet citizens would be willing to fund another organization living in another jurisdiction to share authorit
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If this works out, Israel might have a much bigger counter-suit on their hands.
https://twitter.com/ThisIsGaZa... [twitter.com]
"Israeli sniper terrorist bragging about murdering 13 kids "
Its a name (Score:3)
Corporate States of America (Score:2)
They were planning a name change anyway, this just lets them put some spin on the decision.
Good (Score:2)
Good.
Being a "good guy" or a "bad guy" is always subjective. Whatever nonsense you pull on the "Bad guys" today will eventually be used by them against you once they convince enough people you're a "Bad guy" Best leave nonsensical BS like stripping them on their domains alone. It will only turn out badly. I mean, really, would it be that hard to convince enough people that the USA is a terrorist entity?
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would it be that hard to convince enough people that the USA is a terrorist entity?
And just how many countries have we bombed unprovoked in the past 40 years? How many unconvicted terrorists have we tortured/killed? How many countries have we sold weapons to who have used those weapons on their own populations and/or neighbors?
Oh, right.
Whew. FFS... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, let's tear apart the integrity of our global network for the sake of sticking it to a government. Did anyone think through what would happen if you disrupted the network on such a scale? The national ISPs would host their own root, and anyone abroad who wanted to keep accessing those domains would likewise switch to alt roots.
End result, the domain name system gets fractured, ICANN and the US govt retain less control of the internet, and also they look like assholes.
Good thing this was dismissed as the dumb idea it was.
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Well, having the US government retain less control of the entire internet isn't a bad thing. Unless you're a fucking moron.
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It is from their perspective, which makes this a stupid decision even by their own interests.
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It actually seems like it is bad thing.
IF it goes to the UN, it will the be parted to to different groups.
Going to the UN is a way to splinter the internet. So right now, the US does look like the best practical option. Unless you want different countries to dictate the rules for different parts of the internet.
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I'll tell you what.
Pick a country, any country other than the US. Let them have it for the next 25 years.
Now imagine you're neither country. Dependent on a bully country and some other random country for your internet control. Which would you take? Or the UN?
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Let me guess where you're from.
A place where imagination is non-existent.
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Let me guess where you're from.
A place where imagination is non-existent.
The problem is that in this statement:
Now imagine you're neither country. Dependent on a bully country and some other random country for your internet control. Which would you take? Or the UN?
you are imaging that the US is the "bully country", and failing to imagine what most other countries would do with control over the internet. And actively ignoring what many other countries do with control over their piece of the internet.
The US bullies on plenty of issues. Control over the internet really isn't one of them.
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Sealand! [wikipedia.org]
Whew. FFS... (Score:3)
Yes nations would just go for a version of the classic Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] with a nice web 2.0 feel.
Other nations would then set up their own networks understanding they could be 'next'.
TLDs are sort of names.... (Score:1)
Face Palm (Score:2)
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It's not really analogous to zip codes because zip codes are an internal system of the post office. But authority for TLDs is farmed out to various agencies, governments, or companies, who make money off them and get to decide the rules for registering names under that TLD. See http://www.iana.org/domains/ro... [iana.org]
So .ir is under the authority of the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (http://www.ipm.ac.ir/25/index.jsp) which is "a government-sponsored advanced research institute founded in 1989 in
Not Property??? (Score:3)
What kind of Commie Talk is that? This is the 21st Century and Capitalism and the Free Market are Triumphant.
Everything is property and Must Be Monetized.
In fact, I'm sure that any day now someone will patent each and every individual air molecule on the planet and charge us royalties for breathing them.
We're already well on the way to doing that for water.
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How will that work when the trees I own produce their own air?
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You mean you've set up a large scale factory dedicated to the production of patented air and cunningly disguised it as a garden? You monster! Just think of the hard working companies who you're putting out of business, clearly you must be stopped. For America!
It's far worse than that. Trees don't just "produce" air. They need input! American Industry has worked long and hard to produce all that CO2 and they deserve to be compensated!
Also, the Monsanto auditors will be by shortly to ensure that each and every one of those trees is properly licensed.
Of course they don't. (Score:2)
Jebus H. Christ, Tlds are bits on an HDD. Who can 'own' those? The whole concept of 'intellectual property' is laughable and disintegrates after 3 stages of rationalisation the latest. Especially with network meta directories such as the DNService.
I can send them a HDD full of Tlds, including ones that I just made up. If they pay me a little more I might even take a used server and set up a DNS to serve them.
1000 Euros and it's theirs.
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Nobody wants ownership of the bits on the HDD.
This is not complicated. Think of it as a series of tubes... ICANN decides which tube connects to which name. Right now ".ir" is connected to "the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences" in Tehran, Iran (http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db). The plaintiffs want to force ICANN to disconnect that tube and hook it up to "Some New Registrar Inc." which they will presumably set up. Then they get to decide the rules under which domain names can be registered u
Ooh, maybe they should sieze (Score:2)
Perhaps they should try to sieze their country codes [countrycode.org] instead!
Didn't ICANN already give them all to godaddy? (Score:2)
Disingenuous and poor marketing (Score:1)
But ICANN seem to want their cake and eat it. "The domains are not property and can't be owned" they cry, at the same time as asserting that only ICANN can assign