RE: [ga] Mr. Qaddafi Salutes Verisign

["John Berryhill" <john@johnberryhill.com>]

> > Look, it's very simple.


> However, there are a bunch of complications.
>
> For one thing, some of the anti-terrorism laws might eventually be ruled
> unconstitutional in the US. Certainly organisations like the ACLU are
> asking some hard questions:

That's nonsense.  Yes, there are all sorts of questions about various
anti-terrorism measures.  NOBODY, including the ACLU, has questioned the
constitutionality of OFAC regulations.  That's just a plain nutty argument.
We've had an embargo against Cuba for about 40 years.  I'm pretty sure that
any constitutional issues relating to the Cuba embargo would have come up by
now.  That's just a plain dumb argument, and has nothing to do with the law
we are talking about here.

> Also, booting certain nations off the net might play straight into the
> hands of various extremists there. Consider the fact that Taliban banned
> the Internet in Afghanistan as "unIslamic".

Who cares.  Making drugs illegal increases profits for drug dealers.  Guess
what?  Certain drugs remain illegal.

> There's some sort of trade-off there. Do the forces of Goodness, Right
> and Openness gain more by helping the victims of Benighted Gov'ts to
> get access to the net or by blocking it? What do those victims want?

Who cares?  Do US internet companies get to break a law that everyone else
has to obey simply because they are "special"?  That is the only question,
and the only answer is "no".

> Should we block Cuba, since the US embargo them? Canada has never
> joined that embargo, nor has most of Europe.

The Cuba embargo has lots of exceptions.  I haven't read them, and thus have
not addressed Cuba.  Why don't you go read the regs at the OFAC web site and
let us know.  If they want to register a domain name with Tucows, in Canada,
then whoopee for them.  But we are talking about the simple matter of US
companies obeying US law.  Sure, there might be all sorts of reasons why it
is a silly or counterproductive law.  Then, what you do is you go change the
law.  Or you break the law, and challenge it in court.  But what you don't
do is to sit around and rationalize breaking it.


> Then there's the whole question of the international nature of the net,
> and ICANN's mission to run the thing in the interests of its users
> worldwide. ICANN is a California corporation, hence obviously subject
> to US law. What happens when the mission and US law conflict?

That is an absolute no-brainer.  Go Daddy is a US business.  They are taking
money from Iraq for providing a service to Iraq.  What any of the above has
to do with their violation of the law concerning providing services to Iraq,
I have no idea.

ICANN's mission is to perform services under a contract it has with the
Department of Commerce.  The US Department of Commerce is the ONLY body to
whom ICANN must answer.

If you have a problem with people in country X obeying the law of country X,
then you go talk to the judge in the Smiley litigation, who had no problem
whatsoever applying California's lottery law to an entire "international"
TLD.

> So there are some well-known precedents for the notion that
> international standards for the Internet should place the
> interests of users above the laws of various nations, in
> particular attempting to deliver real security even though
> US law attempts to restrict cryptography to stuff the NSA
> can easily break.

Thoroughly irrelevant.  If the Iraqis want a domain name and they don't want
to induce a violation of US law, then they can go register with a European
registrar.  It is that simple.

> I'm inclined to think that argument applies to international
> standards for domain names. Libya and Iraq, for example,
> are recognised by the UN or International Postal Union or
> whoever assigns country codes. Hence they should have DNS
> service for the corresponding top-level domian.

Wrong.  We already discussed that there are specific treaties which deal
with postal delivery.  Please explain how having an ISO-3166 code means that
you are immune from embargo.  Please also explain what having an ISO-3166
code has to do with the question of whether a corresponding "government"
should control the corresponding TLD.  Do you believe that all ccTLDs should
be controlled by a national government somewhere?  Do you also apply that
logic to uninhabited territories which have them, such as .cc?

> If Verisign cannot deliver that because of US laws, then
> ICANN, as responsible stewards of an international Internet,
> should look for a non-US contractor to run the root.

ICANN has no authority to re-delegate that contract, which is between
Verisign and the DoC directly, and does not involve ICANN.

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