Re: [ga] Request to ban Basque nationalist sites via DNS

[Vittorio Bertola <vb@vitaminic.net>]

On Sat, 31 Aug 2002 17:37:11 +0200, you wrote:

>>Spain steps up pressure on Basque militants at home and abroad
>(...)
>>Spanish prosecutors Friday also requested Judge Garzon to apply to the 
>>Australian government and The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names 
>>and Numbers, based in the United States, to ban Batasuna web sites 
>>including www.batasuna.org, www.euskal-herritarrok.org et 
>>www.batasuna-barakaldo.org.

Well - the usual display of ignorance. Even supporters of the "strong
ICANN" model don't think that ICANN should ever be able to "ban web
sites" :-)

If I were the Spanish government... well, if I actually were, I'd
perhaps try other roads to deal with the persistent Basque terrorism,
and surely I wouldn't go round the world trying to turn off web sites,
but that's another story. However, assuming that I were a government
wishing to close a web site, firstly I'd act on the hosting; and even
in this case, it seems unlikely to me that the DoC will let foreign
governments or law courts force the dissolution of any hosting
contract with an US company, if not on a basis of very informal "moral
suasion".

But for us it is more interesting to understand what might practically
happen about the domain name registration. Of course ICANN does not
have the power of deleting specific registrations, does it? (And I
hope it will never have.) So the Spanish could only challenge the
validity of the registration, either by trying to force Melbourne IT
to delete the registration - but I don't think that a Spanish law
would affect an Australian company, and I don't think that that
registration is in any way illegal under Australian laws - or by
starting an UDRP. 

By the way, the UDRP would possibly be the only "safe" way - if you
simply get the registration deleted, nothing forbids anyone else to go
and register the domain name again one day later; so - given that,
differently from what happens in many ccTLDs, there is not a list of
"forbidden words" that gTLD registries will refuse as domain names -
what you need is really to have the "offending name" owned by
yourself.

Now, if you take the UDRP rules, I don't think there's anything that
says that the Spanish government has any right over batasuna.org more
than Batasuna itself. So either the UDRP rules are modified for this
kind of cases (or simply, a sympathetic ruler invents something funny
to let the Spanish win the cause, perhaps after a set of invisible
international pressures), or we could see the Spanish government
registering "Batasuna" as a trademark trying to exploit it to win the
UDRP - at least if the Basque didn't do it before them :-)

So in the end, my conclusion is partly positive and partly negative:
the positive part is that shutting off web sites still seems to be
very hard, and the negative part is that the only ways you could
possibly use are either by informally and privately exploiting your
power to "convince" service providers to voluntarily close the site,
or by using intellectual property tools. Apparently, the current
international Internet framework is much more favourable to trademark
owners than it is to anti-terrorism efforts.
-- 
vb.               [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<------
----------------------> http://bertola.eu.org/ <--------------------------
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