What happens to country specific TLD's in a war involving that country? | Hacker News Reader

What happens to country specific TLD's in a war involving that country?

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180 pointspolm2365 comments

It doesn't even have to be a war. There are plenty of people in the United Kingdom who own .EU domains and won't be able to renew them after Britain leaves the union since buying and renewing them requires the owner to have an address inside of the union. IIRC the newspapers reported it impacted 10s of thousands of addresses.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16714581

>>[...] requires the owner to have an address inside of the union.

This would bode well for programs like the Estonian e-residency[1] initiative as I believe they also provide an EU address, although it might mean having to legally transfer ownership of the .eu domains from UK entities to the Estonian entity if any businesses are thinking of going through with this.

[1] https://e-resident.gov.ee/

>This would bode well for programs like the Estonian e-residency

Or not, as 1000 other entities and countries will pop up with similar solutions

The Estonian e-residency program launched in December 2014[1], so it's about 2.5 years old. I'd imagine that if there was a really compelling reason to set up a similar program other EU countries would have prioritized and launched.

To your point, perhaps Brexit will push a few more EU countries to follow Estonia's lead, although I'm not sure how successful a program could be without at minimum government endorsement, if not outright involvement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Residency_of_Estonia

> launched in December 2014[1], so it's about 2.5 year old.

I think there's a typo or math error in there somewhere.

Typo and didn't recheck due to lack of coffee. I meant to state the Estonian e-residency program is 3.5 years old.

What if in 20 years Estonia decides to leave as well? It seems like .eu is not a very reliable TLD.

It's not any less reliable than other TLDs. Any nation that owns a TLD can basically do the same thing.

There are a lot of TLDs owned by companies like Google, Verizon etc

I don't see how those would be any more reliable, since companies generally act in their best interest (which may not always be in your best interest if, for example, you find yourself suddenly competing with them)

A domain system on Blockchain is the solution then.

5 years ago we'd send it to the cloud.

"Just do <insert current trendy buzzword here>." has been a common response for decades to any problem.

How old is Namecoin?

https://www.namecoin.org

It's been around for years.

False equivalency. Grexit, Brexit, Frexit...the political realities of the EU are unlike those of most other TLDs.

ccTLDs are occasionally less reliable than gTLDs- The rules for running a gTLD are significantly more standardised. ccTLDs (Country Code TLDs) afford the parent nation much more control. This was largely a sop by ICANN to give countries a sense of sovereignty over their online identity.

There are lots of horror stories out there involving badly administered ccTLDs, as the quality of the body chosen to administer each individual one varies so much.

At any rate, ccTLDs are not run the same way as gTLDs, which is important to note.

What if in 20 years the USA no longer exists?

What becomes of IANA and ICANN?

What if Estonia pulls a Czechoslovakia ?

Maybe political or national tlds aren't reliable.

I’m actually surprised what happened to the SK (Slovakian) TLD mentioned in that answer - it seems to have been taken over by fraud, then the fraudulent new owner of the TLD sold out to some company abroad and they’re now trying to sell out again, and apparently a contract prevents the state from doing anything?

How is that possible? Why can’t the government just ask ICANN to delegate the TLD to a legitimate entity and tell the greedy fraudulent one to fuck right off?

Eastern Europe - if you know someone, or you're someone's someone, these things regularly happen.

I mean it's not inherently bad the entire way. Having a good friend in Poland means I get cheap brakes for my car.

"Grift is fine as long as it benefits me."

"Factory farming is fine - as long as my veal is delectable"

My friend benefits too or is this because he's east european?

They were so cheap you couldn't brake on the moral high road?

Is it now immoral to be friends with people from poland? Has this site sunk so low?

It's exactly the same in the west. The difference is that it's generally more discreet and requirements for the directness with which one must "know someone" are more strict and "knowing someone" and "favors" are much harder to apply across departments/organizations. We're not talking Chicago or rural counties in the deep south here, this is how things work in your run of the mill state and local government.

I agree that there is more indirection involved but I disagree about the discreetness: it's not that corruption in the US is more discreet, it's just far more transparent and normalized within the culture. There is red tape and a bunch of rules to follow so it gives everyone involved a false sense of fairness. You don't give someone a bribe, you donate to their political campaign or charity - which then hires their family to be on the board or as some consultant with a plausibly deniable role. In return, you get Requests For Proposals and contracts with requirements disqualifying everyone except the company owned by one guy who "donated." Even in cases where people are breaking the law, there's simply no money for enforcement or even any established mechanisms for doing so (often on purpose), especially as the changing media landscape erodes local journalism.

From personal experience: I don't bribe policemen, I donate to the police union or contribute money towards some officer's or family member's health or college fund. I don't bribe school administration, I go to a few Booster Club events a year and throw money at whatever their latest stupid fund is. I don't bribe teachers, I show up on the first day of school with enough science lab kits and other school supplies for a whole class. I don't bribe my doctors, I contribute money to the nonprofit clinics they are partnered with, which then pays part of the doctor's annual salary directly so that they can focus more on the clinic.

There is far more indirection and the "return on investment" is certainly far less than what I saw when living in Russia, for example, but that's just lipstick on a pig because at the end of the day, it works. When my kid and his friends were caught with drugs (not cannabis), I got to the station less than 5 minutes after they did and was able to get them out by the next day without even seeing a judge (the evidence was "misplaced" on the way to lockup so the prosecutor felt it wasn't worth his time). When he got into a fight with a close friend, I managed to get both of them off with an in-school suspension instead of an expulsion that would go on their permanent records. Never once did I bring up the donations or threaten to cut them off - my rhetoric in each situation basically boiled down to "boys will be boys but I'll make sure they know what it means to be punished" but the deference I received was far more than the average person would, even when getting special treatment for someone else's kid.

But how in these situations did they know you donated before?

"Donating" falls under the broader category of "community involvement". You pick a small thing that you can put a disproportionate amount of money toward and dominate it or you take lead on something that people will remember. Nobody remembers if you donate $100 to a bunch of things. People remember when you foot the entire bill for some thousand or two dollar expense that kids normally would hold bake sales for. You need to keep on top of it ("donate" to something every few years) but the point is that someone at whatever organization you have to deal with recognizes your last name and associates it with whatever good thing you did and you get favorable treatment similar to what you normally need to be extended family to get. The smaller the town/city the less you need to do to be known as "good"

For example, when some party gets shut down by the cops the kids of the grocery store owner who donates all the food for some annual police/fire/vfw bbq don't have to worry about getting misdemeanors. When it's time to determine who gets what contracts the company that generously sponsored the boy scout troop that the son of whoever is making the decision will get special consideration (all the blue collar small businesses don't sponsor local stuff because it has a negative ROI).

Exactly. You have to donate money or time in ways that maximize your exposure to the in-group you are targeting, which would be the police officers, teachers, school administrators, etc. If you want deference, you need to get involved in ways that make their lives easier or better because that warm fuzzy feeling they'll have when they see or hear your name is very powerful and subliminal.

For example, I live in LA and the 90s were very tough for police all across the state after the Rodney King riots. I was buddies with one of the guys heading up reform in the LAPD after the riots so I "donated" a thousand bucks to have him come out for a weekend and teach the basics of community policing to my underfunded local PD - something that I felt was important anyway because of the wealth inequality in my town. The department didn't have it in their budget to hire him themselves but they did have state money for overtime for police training so not only did every officer get training but they got paid extra to do it. Since my name was dropped multiple times as the sponsor of the training, all of the officers in the department knew who I was and associated my name with someone who supports the department in concrete ways (even if years later, they couldn't remember why!). It also didn't hurt that the training opened their eyes to new strategies at a time when tensions between police and civilians were boiling over.

Also, you can actually do this by donating a little bit to a lot of things but it has to be strategic. For example, a few members of the Booster Club and I have an ongoing scholarship at my local high school where we throw in $250 per donor per student for textbooks for anyone whose parents didn't go to college. Since my town is very wealthy, the number of students who qualify for this scholarship is minimal (a few thousand a year split between 4 people) but it is a guaranteed scholarship to anyone who qualifies so every teacher and administrator knows about the scholarship and who the donors are. Since we are explicit about the money going towards textbooks, it also sounds like a lot more than it really is because people think of the scholarship in the narrow context of textbook costs instead of overall graduation cost.

While your honesty is intriguing, suggesting people do this is pretty immoral. Why don't we spend our time online talking about ways to do things fairly, that'd probably do humanity a favor instead of instilling behaviors to the detriment of most of us.

Being from Slovakia, I guess people in our current government don't really care. The company SK-NIC that was running the TLD has ties with people in the government. It was recently sold to CentralNic, based in England.

Bit.ly is a good example: .ly was the Libyan dns until the political changes there. Bit.ly is now bitly.com

.ly is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Libya. In 2011, the bit.ly address was set to redirect to bitly.com. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitly

Therefore relying on using convenient ccTLD suffixes from third word states as part of a western world url might not be a great idea longer term depending on political change and hostile actions.

Anyone willing to fix the Wikipedia page with the proper URL (https://bitly.com/)? Looks like it’s been vandalized and a spam URL put in its place, and the mobile editor doesn’t work, asks me for a captcha over and over again..

Someone changed it to trim.li (which apparently is another URL shortening service). I've tried changing it to the proper URL, but Wikipedia is preventing me from saving my changes because bitly.com is in their blacklist, as it is a URL shortener.

I couldn't help but chuckle.

Someone was able to fix it.

There's also a whitelist. The specific link was added to the whitelist, then to the article.

That doesn't really show the point you're trying to make.

What I gather from reading the wikipedia article is that they registered bitly.com after the Libyan government seized a .ly domain that was incompatible with their ideology. Nothing to do with the war.

And that decision is a bit questionable anyway. It's quite likely that more .com domains have been seized by the US government than .ly domains seized by the Libyan government.

> And that decision is a bit questionable anyway. It's quite likely that more .com domains have been seized by the US government than .ly domains seized by the Libyan government.

Depends on how you factor in the appeals process going in your favour.

I think the 'seizing by Libyan Government' thing is a bit of a red herring.

I wrote this on ZDnet way back in 2011 on this topic https://www.zdnet.com/article/dead-ly-urls-and-authoritarian...

>appeals process

You have a bigger chance of justice in an appeal with a .ly than a .com - unless you know the right people at UDRP/ICANN. They make Muammar Gaddafi look like a saint!

I still own a .ly domain, under "Libyan Spider," though the public-facing brand name is now "Register.ly."

I also used to own a .so domain, but prices went wildly up at some point during the Somalian Civil War and it wasn't clear I was giving my money to good people, so I let it lapse.

IDK, but I've been anxious AF for a chance to use Afghanistan's, and it doesn't seem to be actively administered.

I once looked into whether it was possible to get a ".ck" domain name, for juvenile and obvious yet potentially humorous domains. It turns out that that's Cook Islands' TLD, and they don't allow direct use of it... instead, they've done the same thing as the UK did, and only allowed domains under ".co.ck".

Which made me chuckle for very similar reasons.

And if you want to make a domain name that makes use of that suffix in a crude way, you won't be allowed to:

> Domains considered profane will not be considered on any level, and the application will be dissolved with the applicant being notified, and future requests for the same domain name will be ignored. '.ck' domains are monitored on the web, on a regular basis for profanity on the Internet if it is found to be doing so, or if the site is deemed inappropriate, the domain will be terminated without notification or refund.

If they were that worried about the crude name possibilities, I wonder why they didn't go with ".com.ck" like some other gTLDs did?

Nathan Barley dot cock

It was trashbat.co.ck which sadly seems to be down right now.

It is actively administered but you need to physically communicate with the Ministry of Communications, in Kabul, to register a domain. This for the most part requires being present in Kabul. There are a number of Afghan domestic corporations that use .AF. The zone files are still edited by hand.

Example of live .AF companies:

http://www.jobs.af/

https://www.roshan.af/en/personal/

http://etisalat.af/

The US has the power to influence the conflict by cutting them off the internet: Cutting off the internet of Syria in 2011 and planting viruses in Iranian networks https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/us/politics/cyber-command...

I’m surprised that question hasn’t been closed as off-topic!

Nah, instead we migrated it to super user, the site for everything programing adjacent.

In-house DNS is an obvious and convenient service to locate hosts on your network. But take it world-wide, and I don’t think it is a greatest idea that could work. Names are random and volatile, and there is no sensible geography that you may use to look for alternatives or to extend your experience. IRL when you want to party, you go to club streets and active places. When you want to buy, you go to big stores. When you want to rest, you look for a park. If you’re into something big and incompatible (like religion, subculture or language), you go to “your land”. But DNS cannot give you that — it void-separates similar and recognizable locations. It is so tech-y and not humane. This void is abused by many to push you to where you’ll spend your value and have nowhere else to go.

Of course, implementing that can be a rock hard task with many real-world complications and abuse prevention, but I would like to open my browser and not see the same fckng nine plates that I visit everyday, instead viewing the live, high-precision public map of the internet that is worth exploring endlessly. TLDs (if any) and country control in that scheme could be designed completely politics irrelevant.

(inb4: TMDH, SL, MC, MMORPG etc)

The KW domain was removed after Iraq invaded Kuwait. [1]

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domain...

That's why I think what we actually need is domain certificates on the SPKI model, where k of n countries must agree that an entity has the right to use a domain. Anything that the U.S., U.K., Russia, China, Eritrea, Chile, Mexico, Canada, Germany & Chad agree on is probably true enough, despite what one might think of each of those states individually.

I hope the British Indian Ocean Territory doesn't go to war!

A question I want to know is what happens if the country splits into multiple countries?

You do NOT need war to have problems. Look at France taking the domain away from the American that owned it for years without any compensation.

"France Seized the Domain France.com from Its Long-Time Owner. Now He's Suing"

http://fortune.com/2018/04/30/france-domain-name-france-com/

As did the US when they seized Megaupload.com from a German, living in New Zealand, who had broken neither German nor New Zealandish law (at least that time).

Well hey man, that was copyright stealing, there are special rules for that.

And entire FBI divisions devoted to investigation of these rules

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