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2010-02-28 22:53
I am always a little shocked to hear people defend the level of control that the American government has over the Internet through its influence of ICANN, and just as shocked to hear people’s paranoid speculation that having America’s role transferred to a UN body would somehow lead to massive censorship and spying taking place, as if that’s never been possible in America, and as if UN technical bodies have any history of doing that. It is understandable when people fall into the logical fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam, with an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” attitude, but even if we don’t know what a future UN solution might look like, we do know what America’s record of managing ICANN is, and it is not something about which you can say “it ain’t broke”. A friend of mine said that it was too stressful talking about these complicated technical and political matters early in the morning while I was driving us to catch a train, but hopefully none of my readers will be browsing my blog in that sort of situation. Anyway, below I will list some past actions of ICANN that are causes for concern, and explain why they were the result of American governmental influence.
- The .iq domain
- The first issue is that America has laws against corporations exporting to certain embargoed nations. Microsoft have interpreted this to mean that they should prevent users from those countries accessing its Windows Live Messenger service, and as ICANN is an American corporation just like Microsoft, that puts them in a difficult position. This became a practical problem when the man responsible for running the top level domain for Iraq was arrested for providing computers to Libya and Syria, which were on the list of embargoed countries. While he was in prison, in 2005, control of the top-level domain was reassigned without his consent. If it is illegal to provide computers to Libya and Syria, it could be or become illegal for ICANN to provide DNS records for those countries, effectively kicking them off the Internet.
- Domains of “illegal” businesses
- Along similar lines, American laws have been used to manipulate the DNS system to block the sites of businesses which are illegal in America, but not in the rest of the world. For example, an English travel agent living in Spain had his sites taken offline because he was offering holidays for Europeans to visit Cuba. Then there is the example of an American state taking an American gambling site offline because of laws in that state prohibiting gambling. While these problems may be more the fault of the domain registrars operating in America than ICANN itself, ICANN is theoretically vulnerable to such legal pressures while it is an American corporation, and American governments have shown in these two examples that they are prepared to make decisions about the internet with little regard for users outside their jurisdiction.
- The .xxx domain
- American senators have proposed legislation that would force ICANN to create a top-level domain for “adult” websites, while the Bush administration opposed the creation of such a domain, thinking that it would “legitimize” such sites. It seems undesirable to have politicians from one country decide questions of global internet architecture based on their views of the “legitimacy” of certain types of businesses and free speech, and besides, the IETF have already told us what to do and what to think.
- Non-Latin characters in domain
- It seems safe to assume that if a country that didn’t use the Latin alphabet had control over ICANN like America does, it would have made internationalised domain names a higher priority. By not providing support for this sooner, ICANN presumably slowed the growth of the internet in places like China, perhaps unintentionally, but this could be seen as helping America achieve some of its foreign and economic policy goals. Removing this sort of conflict of interest is surely the right move for ICANN and the internet.
- Indymedia
- Then there is the shocking case of an Italian court using a bilateral anti-terrorism cooperation agreement with the US to cause the American government to invoke a similar bilateral agreement with the UK, effectively giving an Italian prosecutor power over the UK police. This is relevant because the UK police, following the instructions from Italy, seized the servers of an organisation called Indymedia whose website was being hosted in Britain, which resulted in several unrelated sites being taken offline without warning or any explanation given to their operators. If the American government can justify this sort of censorship, it is difficult to believe they wouldn’t abuse their power over ICANN to give themselves a veto over which foreign sites were accessible, or to at least decide which foreign registrars should be allowed to operate, based on whether the registrar’s policies served America’s strategic interests.
- .gov
- Finally there is the simple fact that American government bodies have exclusive access to the top-level domain .gov whereas other countries have to settle for having .gov as a second level below their country code. There seems to be no technological reason that foo.fed.us couldn’t resolve to the same IP address as foo.gov, running the two systems in parallel for perhaps a 10 year transition period. It is perhaps only out of a desire for prestige that America continues to pollute the top-level address space like this, and the fact that this historical anomaly hasn’t been fixed just confirms the on-going American bias in ICANN.
So if I wrote an extension for Firefox to rewrite all .gov addresses in webpages, and ran a local DNS server, could I make the web look the way I want it to?
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