.af Redelegation: Another Government-Initiated Redelegation

I believe that you will find a great deal of disagreement with the assertion that a ccTLD is the property of the nation to which the ccTLD refers.

As Michael points out, there are many, ICANN included, who adhere to the belief that a ccTLD is nothing but an entry in a database that is managed by ICANN, oops, by IANA, subject to constraints from the US Dep't of Commerce.

ICANN's own written policies, as well as its actions, indicate that the opinion of the government referenced by the ccTLD is but one element in ICANN's, oops, in IANA's, decisions about who is the proper operator.

Because ICANN, oops, IANA, has the ability to make subjective decisions about who gets to run a ccTLD, ICANN is in a position to coerce those who wish to obtain control of a ccTLD into desired modes of behavior, the most overt being that the recipient enters into a ccTLD agreement with ICANN in order to receive ICANN's, oops IANA's, blessing for the ccTLD transfer.

The idea that a ccTLD is a direct aspect of a national sovreignty is challanged when one looks at ICANN's continuing demand that ccTLD operators open their computer records so that ICANN, oops IANA, has unconstrained ability to do zone file transfers of the ccTLD's zone even when doing so is a likely violation of the nation's data privacy laws. (It is all the worse because those zone transfers have no technical justification - they contain no information not available by other less intrusive means that is relevant to the stable operation of the delegation linkage from the DNS root to the ccTLD.)

All in all, I feel the strength of the assertion that ccTLDs derive from and are somehow a part of each sovreign nation. However, there is the competing theory that ccTLDs are merely database entries in Virginia in the USA, and their use and allocation may be placed under pretty much any conditions that ICANN, oops, IANA, choses to impose.

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Re:ccTLDs are a country's property by KarlAuerbach

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Re:ccTLDs are a country's property
by vbertola on Thursday January 16 2003, @11:16PM (#10982)
User #3435 Info | http://bertola.eu.org/

I've been spending the last weeks also in struggling against the Italian government's proposal to gain stronger control over .it (*) - so you can bet that I'm not so enthusiast about the fact that a national government should have the last word on a ccTLD. The best idea would be that a ccTLD is owned by its users, or its "Internet community" - but how do you define them or collate them into a single formal legal entity?

But anyway, while I understand the other theory (and I'm not saying that it's wrong from a legal standpoint - I'm not a lawyer), I'm saying that it's unacceptable from a *political* standpoint. While it could be good if there was an (open and fair) central "appeal" authority that ensures that the local manager acts democratically and in a proper manner, the US government or an US corporation cannot qualify for this role. If US and ICANN really insisted on this, I guess that in a few years most of the other geopolitical entities in the world would start their own roots.

Of course all of this derives from the present crisis of our planet's political structure, that is unable to manage worldwide issues openly and fairly, especially those related to information and immaterial properties - but that's quite a bigger discussion...

Perhaps things could be different if the ccTLD database was "owned" by an international UN agency, not controlled by any government? I'm not saying it has necessarily to be an already existing one :-)

(*) you can read more here [nexus.org] - we were even featured here on icannwatch [icannwatch.org].
--vb. (Vittorio Bertola)

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