On 7-Apr-09, at 8:45 AM, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
However, I concur with the letter that the WDPRS is a useless service that appears to have been deployed more as a token effort than for real. I think it should just be dropped - if people suspect that a website is doing fraud, they should call the police, not ICANN. If there is the need for cross-national cooperation, the various polices should just do their job and get organized to cooperate quickly and effectively. If there are countries that do not cooperate, then this is definitely a matter for national diplomacies to sort out - the US was able to impose its flavour of intellectual property regulation to the whole world through TRIPs and bilateral agreements, don't tell me that it is not strong enough to get cooperation on cybercrime.
I would argue that they didn't, and in terms of cybercrime, the U.S. has one of the weakest anti-spam laws, written by marketers, on the books. There is plenty of work being done for x-border cooperation, in venues such as MAAWG.org and londonactionplan.org but in certain situations such as eastern Europe there is strong evidence of cooperative ventures between cyber criminals and government; I've seen credible reports linking the cyber-attack on Georgia, concurrent with the first bombs dropping, which were attributed to two Botnet herders. So were they in cahoots with the Russian military? Maybe. If so, getting them taken down when they have friends with nuclear weapons might be a tad difficult. The dismissive attitude of the Chinese government to last week's cyber- spying reports is another case in point. Your argument is a strawman, I too do not advocate ICANN's indiscriminate involvement in take-downs because a site collects data in an insecure manner, or due to an erroneous postal code, and I don't know anyone who advocates for such things. There is a role to be played in some particularly egregious situations, and in fact, all roads lead to Rome. There are, in some cases, no-where else to turn BUT ICANN. What we have seen in the one case of a shut-down last year was particularly unsatisfying, when the assets of Registrar owned by a criminal were sold to his business associate. I'm sure ICANN can do better, and certainly from those whom i met in Mexico, I got the impression that there is political will to do so. -- Neil Schwartzman Executive Director CAUCE: The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email Canada: +1 (514) 300 1916 US: +1 (303) 800 6345 Skype: spamfighter666 Fax: +1 (419) 793 0430 [Web]: http://cauce.org See http://stopspamhere.ca for ways to prevent spam from hitting your inbox.