[discuss] cross-border issues in the Internet identifier registry system

[John Curran]

On Mar 17, 2014, at 3:08 PM, Pranesh Prakash <pranesh at cis-india.org> wrote:

> John Curran <jcurran at istaff.org> [2014-03-17 14:42:39]:
>>   I acknowledge your point, but that is not "USG oversight of the IANA function";
>>   it is other USG actions (not even Dept of Commerce related from what I can tell)
> 
> John, the limited point I was making was:
> 
> If a government's Internet censorship record is of importance to oversight (as David's mail would suggest), then I would say that the US government's Internet censorship record should count against it.

Agreed, but in this case the NTIA is seeking to relinquish an existing oversight role;
I would think that URG's overall past record should not inhibit that particular change...

>> ...
>>   a task that is achievable in the immediate future; do you recommend we do not work
>>   on it because of the cross-border issues that are presently happening throughout
>>   the Internet identifier registry system?
> 
> I do no such thing.
> 
> I am merely suggesting that
> 
> a) the censorship bogey is overplayed;
> b) that oversight of an administrative function is not as important as oversight over policy-development, and none of IANA's 4 main roles involves policy development —  the greater threat to free speech is in the policy development arena, not in the administrative function;

Excellent clarification... thanks!

> c) the US government has not been a paragon of domain name free speech, even if the NTIA has not had no role to play in those decisions, and that the domain name seizures we've seen were possible *because* it was not cross-border action.  (It would have been domain name block has it been cross-border, not seizures; it would have affected the population of that country, but not the whole world.)

Interesting distinction - I was using the terminology of the Internet Jurisdiction
project; i.e.  cross-border platforms (such as DNS) create impacts to those under
other jurisdictions even when the enforcement action is local. 
<http://www.internetjurisdiction.net/>

FYI,
/John

Disclaimer: My views alone.