--- On Mon, 6/22/09, Denis Dimick <dgdimick@gmail.com> wrote:

If I understand this correctly, as long as ICANN is "owned" by the US, they have the ability to shutdown anyone they don't like.

While this is certainly a threat, it is not as all emcompassing as it sounds. ICANN may control the currently agreed upon IPs and subnets of the internet, but they do not control the internet backbones which actually route to these agreed upon subnets, do they? So, if we imagine that ICANN goes completely beserk and decides to revoke all the subnets in use in Germany, what would happen? If the ISPs of Germany just keep using them then there is nothing ICANN can do to stop anyone within Germany from communicating to each other with them is there? And, of course, any country with ISPs that have direct links to Germany and decides to continue to route to Germany for those subnets because they think ICANN is nuts, well then anyone in those countries will still be able to communicate with Germany right? Ultimately, the internet it really is just a bunch of people/organizations communicating voluntarily with each other and following certain voluntary guidelines which cannot be imposed by any single organization. A very nice free market real world implementation of cooperation with agreed upon (not forced upon) authorities (mostly). Seems almost like a libertarian anarchist's dream really. :) Again this is not to say that ICANN cannot reak havok, particularly to individuals, just that if they do badly enough, the world will just switch to some other agreed upon authority(ies) and ICANN will become meaningless. They truly can only govern because the governed consent to their governing, they have no physical pull, they are not backed by force. But, since ICANN does have the power to potentially affect individuals, it might make directory servers owned by other non US governments much harder to foil (by ICANN) than those owned by individuals. I surmise this because I think that if ICANN decided to attack the server owned by a government instead of an individual it would likely be seen as ICANN attacking the entire country. The country has more power and influence with those who follow ICANN than most individuals do. Just a thought... Cheers, -Martin ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE