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South Africa Wants Control of .za

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the no-holds-barred dept.

fdiaz5583 writes "Recently, the South African government wants to seize control of the .za domain. However, ICANN owns the domains and under the ICANN rules, they will not relinquish control. Mike Lawrie who is global administrator of domain names states: 'If it becomes illegal for me to do the job under South African law and if I am not authorized by ICANN to hand over the administration, the .za domain will have to shut down until the issue is cleared up'." We mentioned this tussle earlier. The .za administrator doesn't like the way the government is going about this; the government, of course, has men with guns, so it's not like he's going to win in the end, it's only a question of how ugly it will get.

1 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. The South African Government's error is ... by chris_sawtell · · Score: 1, Redundant
    ... thinking that they can control the internet in South Africa by controlling the .za domain name servers.

    This is about as silly as thinking you can control the phone system by controlling the publication of a 'phone directory.

    Look at these alternatives. It would be:-

    1. Quite possible - technically anyway - for South Africa to share the .sa top-level domain name with Saudi Arabia.
    2. Not very difficult to re-organise the whole country in a grass roots and ad hoc way as third-level domains under southafrica.com, southafrica.org, and southafrica.net. The root nameservers for the country would then not be in the country and thus not under the juristiction of the Government of South Africa which would then left with only the gov.za domain to worry about. Looking in from afar, it would seen that that might be a very suitable solution.
    3. Forget about the Domain Name Service altogether. All the good names have gone, and we can just use numbers instead. Try putting http://64.28.67.150/ into your browser location bar window and see what happens - I promise you it's absolutely safe. We all use numbers to make 'phone calls, don't we? Works dosn't it? Also because the vast majority of accesses are off a link in some e-mailed document or off a search engine, the DNS is somewhat irrelevent now anyway.
    Just a few thoughts for the Government of the Republic of South Africa to think about before they start getting stroppy with guns etc. name is totally