Jean and all my friends, I disagree, ICANN is International Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, and this is a technical coordination issue which is squarely/centerally in ICANN's mission and responsibility. ICANN isn't however at fault here, but it can cut the ccTLD out of the Root Servers routing tables to influence Pakistan to discontinue this activity. Further however, YouTube/Google could have been much more sensitive to Pakistans social structure and practices as well, but obviously it is not. Shame on YouTube/Google. Hopefully the DOC/NTIA will council Vint and YouTube/Google appropriately, and soon as well as in the sternest of tone and manner! Jean Armour Polly wrote:
Hi Evan-- this isn't about whether or not Pakistan censored the Internet. Clearly, that's outside ICANN's mission. But Internet stability certainly ICANN's mission.In fact the very first sentence on the ICANN "About" page is"To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an address into your computer - a name or a number. That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination we wouldn't have one global Internet." If 2/3rds of the Internet couldn't get to a particular site, I'd have to ask if ICANN should not be looking at that. best, Jean Armour Polly At 1:28 AM -0500 2/27/08, Evan Leibovitch recently said:
Jean Armour Polly wrote:
Over the weekend, the Pakistan Telecom Authority ordered Pakistan's ISPs to block YouTube. The ISPs shared BGP (Border gateway protocol) data, which advertised routes to nowhere for YouTube. [...]
How stable is the Internet, anyway? Perhaps ALAC would like to discuss. I question whether ICANN -- and thus ALAC -- has a role in this.
I've always been conscious of vision-bloat, and we have a hard enough time churning policy that IS relevant to ICANN. The Pakistan issue, so far as I can tell, is one of abuse of the routing system, not of fraudulent or manipulative abuse of domain names.
ICANN is not IGF or IETF or WSIS; its mandate is fairly specific. Unless there is a direct relevance to ICANN policy, I don't think this is a
useful forum to debate the Pakistani actions.
- Evan
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