Internet Routes Around South African Gov't

Mister B writes: "In an end-run around the South African government's plans to seize control of the .za domain, administrator Mike Lawrie took pre-emptive action and moved the primary .za zone file offshore. Revealing their naivete, parliamentary committee chairman Nkenke Kekana accused him of destabilising the net! Then again, the opposition think he's a hero. :-) More details on MSNBC."

Comments

dangerous

[fferreres]

A lot (if not all) internet businesses will depend on DNS working fine. And just 1 guy can bring it down? Why? How?

I wouldn't like to live in SA right now. He myght be a hero now, but he may become a non-hero whenever he likes. Also, he may die with some passwords unknown (recall the s. hacker contest for the library), or ran out of resources, etc.

It should be run by an independant goverment agency with stable staff and that directly depends on ICANN. Something like an independant Central Bank, but for hosts/domains.

Re:If not the government?

[skaffen42]

I think Mike Lawrie understands the role of a domain administrator very well. As he explains it: "The domain administrator operates with the trust of the community. He doesn't own the domain."

The problem is that the Sotuth African internet community (justifiably) does not trust the SA government to act responsibly and competently in this role.

For local coverage of the situation see http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.jsp?o=4704

Re:If not the government?

[Twylite]

You're absolutely right. Lawrie doesn't want to give it to the government because of the laws they want to put on the .za domain. Unfortunately there are 60%+ of the population who democratically elected the government to represent their interests, and Lawrie doesn't actually have a fucking say in WHAT laws government intend to make.

The SA government has to abide by ICANN rules, yes. ICANN rules require that the ccTLD administrator has the blessing of the national government, which Lawrie does not, and never did have. Apart from that, they do not require that SA not apply its national laws to domain ownership, dispute resolution, policy formation, etc, etc.

Who can you trust?

[oldstrat]

So the question is really begging, but nobody really wants to answer it.

Who can we trust to administer the domain system?

A government, a group of governments, a group of individuals, or a corperation?
My gut response is none, all, some,and sometimes in no particular order
The internet was created on a trusted network achitecture.
That was great in the day when it was military and academic, but as the original architects feared, the net is not scaling well to a commercial and corperate environment.
Solutions?
Several I can see;

1.- Put it back in the hands of academia.
2.- Create a distributed user based system that is 'meta-moderated' something like the slash message system.
3.- Allow, or force a splinter into a sometimes compatible, sometimes not group of trans-internets that would sortof sometimes talk to each other in a fashion related to the way usenet works, and sometimes doesn't.

There's going to have to be medicine taken to fix these problems that have grown and grown, I'm just hopeful that whatever the medicine is, it doesn't kill the patient.