You may remember that I was the one who, during the Public Forum at ICANN meeting in Ghana, sent an e-mail which Vint Cerf read, and which commented Stuart Lynn's initial idea that governments should have more weight in ICANN exactly by saying that you would then remove power from those people in Iraq trying to use the Internet to communicate with the rest of the world, and give it directly to the Iraqi government.

And yet, what disturbs me in your comment is the idea that the fact that the United States forbid trade with some foreign countries which they judge as "terrorist" is enough to deny these countries the possession of domain names in global TLDs. As you can see, what the US thinks about Libya or Iraq is not necessarily shared by the rest of the world, and in fact ICANN being subject to US laws, rather than to international treaties, is one of its biggest weak points.

So I think that discussion on this issue should not be mixed with judgements about whether this or that particular government is democratical or not. Simply reformulate your reasoning with "Chile", "United Kingdom", "Japan" or any of your favourite countries in place of Iraq, and in my opinion we'll have a more appropriate discussion.

--vb. (Vittorio Bertola)