Danny and all, Indeed this is an important policy issue which seems to be not adequately or substantially addressed vis a vi ICANN, and perhaps is a significant issue for Users of the ALAC as they are or will be significantly effected or impacted in some form or another. Along this same line I believe EFF is or has been addressing this issue and a recent conference which some of our members will be attending has been announced, See: http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=863 ( gotta pay to see this one, sorry ) Danny Younger wrote:
I am reposting the insightful remarks of Bertrand de La Chapelle (Special Envoy for the Information Society, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs -- GAC member) found on the cpsr governance list on the topic of the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) action with regard to the Cuban-themed websites of Steven Marshall -- (note: this topic was first raised in the article "A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears" by Adam Liptak of the New York Times).
Milton,
Following your remarks to McTim below, and supposing this indeed is done through the courts, the interesting set of questions here is :
1) Would/should a foreign registrar comply with a court order from the US ? 2) And if it failed to do so, would the court order Verisign to do it (block the domain name) ? 3) Should Verisign do it, does that mean that all .com registrants become indirectly subject to US law, not only in terms of appropriate strings, but also in terms of the very activity they run, even on servers not located on US territory and serving customers outside of the US ?
This is a real and useful discussion. Nothing to do with the "oversight of the root" via IANA. It is exposing the core challenge of competing or overlapping jurisdictions and probably the need for some "globally-applicable public policy principles". I believe nobody has the full complete answer. In my personal view, this is an illustration of the mutation of sovereignty, disconnecting it from the sole physical territory and allowing it to expand in a fractal manner on other territories - or conversely, retract - depending on the influence of the corresponding national actors in the digital sphere. And those national actors are not only the governments : the existence of a dominant player in a specific domain (Verisign, but also a Google, YouTube, MySpace or Facebook) does bring the corresponding government a leverage. But it probably also gives it a special responsibility it did not have before.
This notion of "fractal sovereignty" is harder to handle than the traditional territory-based one but probably more adapted to our connected world than the notion of strict subsidiarity : the challenge is to manage interdependence and interactions.
To enrich the discussion, I'd like to put in perspective here the issue of IDNs. Will the physical location of the future major registries for IDN TLDs (particularly gTLDs if any) give the corresponding national courts a specific authority/legal power on all registrants in those TLDs, even if they are not located in that country and have no business with its citizens ?
These are deep policy issues and I'd be interested in comments on those challenges. Because they are challenges for governments too.
Best
Bertrand
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