Re: [ga] South African .za ccTLD administrator takes drastic action to prevent government takeover

[William X Walsh <william@wxsoft.info>]

Friday, June 14, 2002, 7:43:37 AM, Jim Ayson wrote:

> At 10:45 PM 6/13/2002 -0700, William X Walsh wrote:
>>Lawrie, a South African Internet pioneer who is not paid for
>>administrating the ZA domain, told Reuters he had taken pre-emptive
>>action to stop the government from seizing control.
>>
>>"The storage of the primary zone file that defines and controls the ZA
>>namespace is now offshore," he said.

> This is a problem when one individual controls a ccTLD. What if Lawrie gets 
> hit by a truck tommorow? Will .ZA just go into limbo?

Not at all.  Just like the Internet didn't collapse when Jon Postel
died.

There is no problem with one person being the delegate for a Top Level
Domain.

The problem is that the government thinks it has the sole ability to
determine who runs that TLD, or that it has some rights to make that
decision unilaterally.  It doesn't.

The management of that TLD is a matter of the delegation between IANA
and the delegate.  The government has no role in that.

Unfortunately, however, in exchange for support for ICANN, ICANN sold
out to powerful governmental interests such as the European
governments and Australian government who demanded that they have a
say in the management of ccTLDs.  This was a bad move in my opinion, a
very bad one.  It was a step backwards for the effort to maintain and
further private management of the DNS.  But in exchange for
recognition, ICANN sold out and created the GAC and then adopted a
change to RFC1591 that gave governments a stronger role in the ccTLD
arena.

However, that doesn't give any government the right to decide on its
own that it is assuming management of a ccTLD.  It merely makes the
government a party to any discussions about redelegation issues.

South Africa is making a move based out of complete ignorance over how
the DNS works, and what is involved, simply because a few ignorant
legislators realized that they could create a new bureaucracy and
possible revenue source for the government.

The delegate should be applauded for taking the necessary steps to
prevent the nationalization of the ccTLD zone file without a proper
and informed process in place.

-- 
Best regards,
William X Walsh <william@wxsoft.info>
--
Save Internet Radio!  
CARP will kill Webcasting!
http://www.saveinternetradio.org/


--
This message was passed to you via the ga@dnso.org list.
Send mail to majordomo@dnso.org to unsubscribe
("unsubscribe ga" in the body of the message).
Archives at http://www.dnso.org/archives.html