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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."
Um, shouldn't the government be in charge of the .za domain name? I mean who do you think should be? some random person who happens to have control at the moment?
Country codes are for countries, and decisions for the countries are made by their governments.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"It would amount to sabotage if he were to disrupt the Internet and he has to realize that he will be held responsible for any disruption," Kekana said.
Well then ! By the government's argument isn't he doing the right thing?
If it is his job to ensure the internet setup in ZA remains stable, and he believes it will make ZA unstable if the government reassigns his job to someone else without first ensuring that the government has the infrastructure to take on this job, then wouldn't it then be his responsibility to take steps to make sure the government could not carry out any destabilizing action?
Just carrying out his job, he is. No?
I wish the news articles on MSNBC weren't so skimpy. Where's the BBC when you need it? Are there any more clearly-written summaries of all this out there?
Geeks created the internet and Geeks should control it.
Computer Geeks tend not to be to concerned with politics they have a higher standard "Network Integratiy"
sorry for any typos Ive been drinking
http://Lenny.com
Today's Friday where I live, so my slashdot persona is going to be in a more observational and theoretical mode.
I don't like the way ICANN presently works, but it seems a bit wrong for any government to decide it wants to usurp something independent that lots of others have devoted so much hard work and effort towards, just because it's successful. (On the other hand, I know this happens all the time.) I also don't have a whole lot of respect for the current South African government.
The ideal way for a government to deal with something like this in theory would be to set up its own DNS system in competition that's administered by the government under its own terms. Then it would try to convince people and ISP's, both in SA and everywhere else, to use it instead of the ICANN-authorised one. The biggest problem with doing this is that it could turn out to be risky if not completely impractical. There will probably always be people who will never allow anything other than ICANN to reach their users.
There have been lots of attempts at alternative DNS's set up against ICANN, but most haven't been incredibly successful scale-wise. Most of them haven't had a major organisation or government behind them, though. With the extra resources available though, is it technically feasible that a country could do something like set up an alternative DNS that people would trust if it chose to?
Determining who's in charge of and who should be in charge of South Africa can be quite interesting.
More importantly, ICANN has policy prohibiting involvement with national entities, or making TLD changes at national request. They know that goverments in coups or breakaway states can get an easy legitimization by getting their own TLD. They follow *only* the ISO country code charts. To some degree, this guy is simply following in the same spirit -- keeping the Internet out of national power squabbling, and maintained by the same set of volunteers and computer gurus who have kept the thing working well for ages.
May we never see th
...how are we going to route packets to Lesotho? This country is completely surrounded by South Africa!
Satellite
May we never see th
OK. Right now .za is effectively controlled, along with everything else, by ICANN. And the problem in this case is that ICANN see fit to delegate this responsibility to a particular individual.
.za, they should not be allowed to try. Why break something if it works?
That may be good, that may be bad. Actually in this case it is good, because this guy has done a great job for quite a while (and for free), while south africa has royally fscked things up in their own country quite a bit. Furthermore, this guy is a good guy. He has been asking for someone to take the job off his hands for a while. And south africa are being jerks. The fogeys in the gov't decided to make this man's actions illegal, by means of passing a law causing anyone who controlls state "stuff" to be a criminal.
But the above is irrelevant. ICANN shouldn't decide who controlls top level domain names! thats the job for governements. Or maybe the united nations!
Actually, it is ICANN's jobs. The United States of America created something called "ARPAnet", the departement of defense created a computer netowork in order to survive a nuclear attack. And then it blossomed into the internet, a very american and commercial enterprise. And so the gov't, and some other people, made ICANN.
now, ICANN has some 'issues', but they most certainly do their job. And it is most certainly their job. South africa, if they really care, can make their own internet. They can call it "ZANet," which is somewhat catchy. That would be the governemet's job.
However, until the gov't demonstrates that they can successfully administer
And finally, I get to what I am really ranting about. Geopolitical issues and the internet. I think that it is really stupid that any country should be able to control someone in another country because they can access their data. China and censorship. France and that nazi stuff they were trying to censor. Frankly, I think that if the stuff is hosted here, our laws apply. If someone starts a new country, lets call it "bastardlawsuitland," and then makes a law that slashdot is illegal, can they sue slashot because slashdot didn't make itself inaccessible to them in their country?
By the current laws, which admittedly are very very vague, the answer is yes. And that pisses me off to no end.
Oh, I have karma to burn, by the way. But I am pissed off and this is relevant.
The ".za" domain name is neither a person nor is it land. Therefore I don't see what sovereignty has to do with anything. If I write a book called "South Africa", does the South African government get to decide who around the world can read it?
Top-level domains are not national property; they are a logical construct brought into and maintained in existence by whoever runs the root servers, for the convenience of internet users. Those who run the root servers have pledged no allegiance or subordination to the South African government.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
How about Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers
That'd never work - with rampant poverty in SA, your datagrams will be eaten by starving africans.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Internet namespace, like many other activities, is an activity for civilized society to make intelligent decisions about. Governments sometimes get into power by being the most intelligent people in civil society, like Plato's hypothetical philosopher-kings, but they often get to power by being a bunch of violent corrupt thugs, or by being a more popular alternative group of people who led a popular revolution to overthrow a bunch of violent insane corrupt thugs, but that doesn't mean that either they have any skills for operating an internet or that they have any moral authority for doing so. And apparently they South African government has demonstrated that they don't have Clue 1 about how to run an Internet. It's simply not their skill set, and there's no reason for it to be their job.
Unlike non-country-code domains, where there's no obvious reason why there should be One Root To Rule Them All or why the US government should get to appoint the people to run it, country-code domains do have some obvious connection to the countries they're named after - but does that mean they should be run by the Post Office, or the One Phone Company, or by some internet standards committee (my preference), or by the Chamber of Commerce, or by the [Insert-Country-Name] National Geographic Society, or simply by the First-Come-First-Served rule? It's a hierarchical name space, and that inherently means somebody's in charge. Failing to define that up front, as the internet failed to do, leads to all this Root Wars nonsense, and it's not inherently fixable.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Why? Who gave the South African government control over the .za domain? If there was a ".southafrica" domain, would they have automatic right to control that, too? If I invent a new namespace tomorrow, does that mean governments automatically get portions of it that they control? There's no "matter of course" about it. Many ccTLDs are not controlled directly or indirectly by the corresponding governments, but by universities or telephone companies.
Now, since the organization or person controlling a country's ccTLD usually resides in that country, it's not as if the government has no say...
But, the point is precisely that "this guy" is who the people running the root name servers chose as the administrator of the .za domain. There _is_ a process that ICANN has for transferring domain ownership. The South African government just doesn't want to play along; it wants to tell ICANN what to do, and it doesn't have that right. Nor is government appropriation of a previously private role to be taken lightly.
Of course, as you imply, this has nothing to do with "who's in charge of South Africa", and everything to with "who's in charge of a set of config files that identify a logical region roughly congruent with South Africa within an independently administered opt-in internetwork".
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
And lay off the name calling. It may score you mod points but it really is juvinile.
.za file. My poit is that wether they do or no is entirely up to them. The government can't "seize control" if ICANN tells them they can't. Now I haven't seen a statement form ICANN one way or another, so I don't know what they intend.
.za domain and there is little the government can do about it other than challenge it in US court.
.za domain and then that is that. However there seems to be a misconception that the government can somehow usurp authority without ICANN's permission and that is simply not true.
I never claimed that ICANN couldn't or wouldn't accept the South African government's control of the
I am attempting to respond to those that think that the South African government can somehow just take control of the domain against ICANN's wishes (and many who seem to think that is a great thing). No, they can't. If they take over the domain and ICANN choses NOT to accept their authority, their only recourse would be:
1) To attempt to use physical force to make ICANN and the roots obey their wishes. Since most of the roots and ICANN itself are located in the US, this is not possable.
2) To attempt to use legal force to make ICANN obey their wishes. This could potentially work, the courts would hear the case at least.
3) To ignore ICANN and operate their own root level service.
Now again, this is all assuming that ICANN does indeed decide to deny the government's authority. If they say ok to the change over, that's the end of it.
However, the point of my post is to attempt to explain the nature of the whole DNS heirechary to the people that are under the mistaken impression that a government can simply "seize control" of a domain. They can't, ICANN can simply instruct the roots not to listen to them. As with all DNS information, it's based on trust. The roots trust ICANN, most DNS servers in the world trust the roots, the roots trust those that are approved to administer changes to a given domain. Thus, for most people, what ICANN says, goes.
About the only way this will get changed is if the US courts decide ICANN is doing something wrong and force a legal rememdy on them, or a large alternate root network comes to life and gets widely accepted.
Now I'm not trying to endorse ICANN or disparage them, i'm just telling you how it is. For now, they make the rules regarding DNS. They can, at their discression, decide wether to accept the South African government as the new administrator of the
Again, this is all dependant on what ICANN decides. They may well decide to allow the government to administer the
Next time, read a little more carefully and try not to resort to namecalling. It makes you sound like a little kid.