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