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 ICANN's China Question
posted by michael on Monday October 07 2002, @10:12AM
Several people have expressed concern that ICANN's next meeting will be in China, arguably the greatest source of what ICANN calls 'instability' on the Internet. Lots of people both in and outside of ICANN feel very strongly that any deployment of resources that threatens to return different results for a given URL depending on where the request happens to be made are simply anathema. This fear is the basis of ICANN's campaign against alternate roots: any deviation from a fully hierarchical root creates the possibility that there will be name collisions, leading to inconsistent results. It appears from news reports that China has been redirecting http requests, especially those directed at search engines, in order to block its citizens' access to information. By meeting in China, some people suggest, ICANN will be seen to tacitly supports this, or fail to oppose it, or at the very least demonstrates astonishing insensitivity to the values of free exchange of information that we would hope would guide any Internet policy making. (Not to mention that China may be engaging in wholesale trademark infringement online, on a scale to dwarf cybersquatting -- this is networksquatting!)
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The following submission by an anonymous contributor is an example of the kinds of concerns being raised...outside of ICANN of course. Apparently, ICANN picks the venue for its meetings according to a simple metric: first, choose the continent/region. Then find a place where the local government or other body is willing to pick up the expenses. Freedom, or even government-backed Internet instability, isn't an issue.
Anonymous writes: AP reports that mainland Chinese who went online Thursday to read a Hong Kong newspaper were redirected to a Falun Gong Web site in Canada.
Ming Pao, a respected independent Hong Kong daily newspaper, ran an online story about the incident and said it suspected Gong was responsible. But a Hong Kong-based spokesman for the outlawed meditation sect said they were in no way responsible for the DNS hacking, in fact,
``We suspect others are trying to frame Falun Gong with these kinds of tricks. In a free and open society, you don't have to resort to these tactics.'' Time Magazine has a story about a similar set-up: China's New Game - as early as 1999. Dynamic Internet Technology Inc., a company providing technical services to Voice of America's Chinese-language Web site explains,
“This is the largest web site hijacking activity in history. Since late last week, visitors to the most popular forbidden sites are re-directed to a single IP address, which is already blocked in China at the international gateway level. This is performed by spoofing DNS records on name servers all over China.”
DIT Inc have also provided a Real Time Testing of Domain Name Resolution in China widget that shows, for example, that the www.voa.gov domain name has just been hi-jacked on every network in China...there's going to be some explaining to do in Shanghai... One of my main concerns is that the local sponser of the meeting is IOS [Internet Society of China] - instigator of the er... cult-like Self-Censorship pledge . . . http://go.openflows.org
For the record, ISOC China is not an official ISOC chapter.
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private parties set up cooperative, alternate roots and ICANN calls this an unstable act. A sovereign country hijacks DNS within its borders and ICANN has a meeting there. That's certainly one point i'm making. ICANN has a duty (inferring an expertise) to become involved in the content regulation of a sovereign country? ICANN has a duty to not become involved in content regulation - available evidence suggests that China is using DNS to control access to cotent, ICANN has a duty to respond.
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Global Governance 2002 Civil Society and the Democratization of Global Governance
Palais des Congrès, Montréal, Québec, Canada
October 13-16, 2002
The globalization of the planet is occurring faster than is the capacity for adaptation of governance structures. Nation states are losing control over matters traditionally within their sovereignty; the emergence of city states is increasingly imaginable, and trans-national corporations are functioning in a borderless working environment beyond national jurisdictions. The Bretton Woods Institutions and the WTO are expanding their reach. The United Nations institutions have lost prominence and power. A multi-headed global civil society - an expression of the growing 'people's multilateralism' - is increasingly influencing the international agenda. Traditionally, civil society has dealt with issues related to the quality of life. Increasingly, and especially at the global level, civil society is dealing with problems such as unchecked violence, militarism, bigotry, and pollution that threaten the survival of the species. Global Governance 2002 (G02) is an opportunity to understand better the nature of these trends, and an occasion to help define the role that global civil society can, and should play during this time of dramatic change.
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