[discuss] Host country

[David Conrad]

Hi,

On Mar 18, 2014, at 2:00 PM, S Moonesamy <sm+1net at elandsys.com> wrote:
> At 11:13 18-03-2014, Seun Ojedeji wrote:
>> My  understanding is that this political sanctions does not affect internet operation in those regions especially as it relates to names and IP resources.

I believe your understanding is mistaken. While governments may make exceptions (for whatever reason), I believe sanctions are intended to alter behavior of the entity being sanctioned and presumably, impacting Internet operation would encourage behavior being altered.

>> Are you saying this is not practically the case? i.e does ICANN threat requests from those region differently from others due to  governmental political sanctions?

No. As far as I know (that is, at least while I was at ICANN and I believe today), all requests for service are treated by ICANN identically. However, part of request processing is to determine if a license is required to provide services and, if so, obtaining that license. This is obviously not something ICANN can control since it must obey the law, regardless of the country in which it operates.

> The above questions are about the past.  The Root zone has been working up to now.  

Yes. However, it is worth pointing out that one of the roles NTIA has performed is facilitating ICANN getting licenses from U.S. Dept. of Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), in order to provide root management services to entities (e.g., countries or 'specially designated nationals') under sanction. I personally do not know how much of that facilitation is actually required (that is, whether OFAC would grant the license even without NTIA facilitation). It will be interesting to find out.

> There has been a few issues, e.g. see the .nz comments.  These issues haven't affected the Root zone.  Will it be in the interest of the relevant government not to exercise sanctions in future?

I'm fairly certain all countries have an equivalent to the US Treasury OFAC license mechanism. Whether the governments of those countries would allow licenses to be granted for all IANA-related activities as the USG has done is indeed an interesting question.

Regards,
-drc

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