Following is excerpted from a Q&A with Axel Pawlik, a very interesting fellow who is a managing director at RIPE. It's a regional address registry and operates the "K" root server, which along with the other root servers maintains the list of top-level domains. Axel's views are noteworthy because the root servers effectively serve as a check on the power of the Bush administration, which said this summer that it wants to be the only one to "authoriz[e] changes or modifications" to the list of top-level domains: http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/USDNSprinciples_06302005.htm -Declan --- http://news.com.com/Root+servers+The+real+Net+power/2008-1028_3-5961465.html [...snip...] Q: What would happen if the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decided to approve a new top-level domain--say .xxx--and the Bush administration decided to veto it? Axel Pawlik: In that case, I don't know what the root server operators would do. Likely they would publish whatever is approved by ICANN. There is a difference between the content and the publication. We're only publishers of the root zone file. We take it from IANA (a function of ICANN) and we publish it. Q: Let's say the Bush administration accuses Syria of fostering terrorism and decides to invade. And it demands that ICANN remove Syria's .sy domain from the Internet. What would you do? Axel Pawlik: I don't believe that the U.S. government would be that stupid. Seriously, this has never come up. But I am quite certain that the Internet community at large would not like that decision and I'm not sure it would be carried through. [...snip...] _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Tue Nov 29 2005 - 10:21:30 PST