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Comment by lotu | Hacker News Reader

It certainly would be technically possible. ICAN would have to alter the records in the root DNS server to point to a new IP address controlled by the family. The family could then extort existing users of the domain for the privilege of retaining their domain name, begin collecting yearly fees from them, or open a new register for anyone that wants .ir domain name. Yes this would be disruptive and quite possibly trigger a split in the DNS records but it is very technically possible.

It is also possible the family already knows all this, and don't care. It is conceivable that they aren't after money so much as looking for ways to hurt Iran.

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And then Iran just keeps the DNS and IP entries active in their country anyways so that its people can keep on using those resources. And i doing so, we have broken the internet.

This is why an organization that manages something as important as IP addresss distribution and Domain management, can NOT be part of 1 country. Why does 4 families and a judge have the power to basically kill all internet access in a country, because someone got killed, no matter how they died.

> Yes this would be disruptive and quite possibly trigger a split in the DNS records but it is very technically possible.

More likely it would trigger a change in how DNS works. The only reason that DNS can work the way it does is that things like this don't happen.

ICANN can't force anybody's DNS resolver to point at their root servers. The root servers operate based on consensus. The only reason everyone uses the same ones is that everyone agrees how they should resolve top level domains. As soon as you start forcing decisions using courts and politics you destroy the consensus and blow the whole thing up.

I'm not sure the whole world would find and aggree on an alternative root that quickly, though.

That's actually the problem. You could end up with more than one root. Or dissolution of the root altogether and some free for all for top level domains with whoever can convince Comcast, Google, China or British Telecom to add a top level domain record to their resolvers.

That would be the end of ICANN. It would be more or less immediately replaced by a distributed system and rightly so.

Russia would be one of the parties supporting such a decentralized system, China quite possibly as well and even the US would probably not want a judgement in favor of the plaintiffs in this case.

All the easier to feed the correct information to subjugated subjects.

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