Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

So, all holders of subdomains of those ccTLDs should pay collectively for the deeds of their country?

That's a pretty warped view of justice. ccTLDs are not 'assets' that you should be able to seize but registries. Imagine trying to seize the land registry of Iran or their registry of vehicles because Iran refuses to pay some foreign entity.

This is an excellent illustration of why ICANN should be replaced by a system that is distributed enough that nobody would ever think of even attempting to do something like this ever again.

What a tremendously misguided lawsuit, even if we're not getting into the 'x supported y and y did harm' part of the argument, which makes this even more tenuous.

If everybody that suffered from the meddling of some country through indirect sponsorship had a legitimate grievance and was given the power to shut down some large chunk of the internet as a remedy in order to extract some amount of money then that would open up a huge can of worms, .COM would be the first to go.

>This is an excellent illustration of why ICANN should be replaced by a system that is distributed enough that nobody would ever think of even attempting to do something like this ever again.

Such as?

DNS is useful because it is authoritative. What would happen if two parts of this 'distributed' ICANN disagreed on something? Different parts of the internet would see a completely different state (e.g. who owns gov.uk?), Thus rendering DNS effectively useless.

The only alternative I could see to ICANN being a US organisation is for it to be given authority by treaty. And that would open up a whole other can of worms. ICANN run like the ITU?

Well, another alternative would be to turn ICANN over to Iran, would you be comfortable with that? How about the Swiss? I'd be perfectly happy if ICANN were a Swiss organization.

Why do you believe Switzerland would be a good home for ICANN like organisation?

Because they're pretty good at resisting outside pressure and have a reputation for reliability and long term vision.

Only if you have gobs and gobs of money.

Swiss Bank Secrecy Succumbs To U.S. Tax Enforcers

http://www.forbes.com/sites/irswatch/2014/02/03/swiss-bank-s...

jacquesm did not say that they were impervious to it, only that they are "pretty good at resisting outside pressure".

I think Namecoin would be a good solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin

>DNS is useful because it is authoritative. What would happen if two parts of this 'distributed' ICANN disagreed on something? Different parts of the internet would see a completely different state (e.g. who owns gov.uk?), Thus rendering DNS effectively useless.

This problem can be solved in distributed system using bitcoin-like proof of work scheme. If two parts of the network disagree, the bigger part is considered right. Namecoin project is trying to implement distributed DNS using this technique - http://namecoin.info/ .

Namecoin is one way. But why do you really need an authoritative registry? Think about Google's Real Names policy. Who does it benefit? If I don't want you to see my real name, why would I want you to find me by my real name? You should be able to find me only through existing connections you already have established in internet space.

If you want some authoritative distributed hash map, you can use namecoin like you said. But think about why you actually need an authoritative registry.

Hyperlinks? The document embedding the hyperlink can also embed the IP number. In fact, that's how the underlying IP routing system works. BGP isan interesting target for spoofing as of late.

At the very least, a website wishing for others to find it by its domain name should tell more than one registry, so there isn't a single point of failure. In the trade-off between consistency and having no single point of failure, you can think of the latter as failover or backup plan.

> ICANN run like the ITU?

Do you see any problem with that?

all holders of subdomains of those ccTLDs should pay collectively for the deeds of their country

That's the least problematic issue and yes, you're routinely expected to pay for deeds of some larger organization, your government in particular. Every time the government is sued and loses for example, you foot the bill.

This however has the potential of completely breaking routing of any global network. If they can seize IP addresses, domains, then why not phone prefixes.

For some political background, this comes in the wake of the tremendously successful UANI attempt to get Iran kicked off SWIFT, which showed - after the Wikileaks banking blockade - very clearly just how politically manipulated our financial systems are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UANI#Leadership

After that success, this is an attempt to go one step further and knock out fundamental civilian and government communications systems... though we can be sure that virtually all internet, satellite, radio and telephony communications out of Iran are already logged and searched by similar parties, seizure of network addresses would be an extremely damaging move.

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