preserving the freedom of the internet

[kespernorth]

Recently, the South African government voted to establish absolute government control over the assignment of .za domain names -- essentially, they would be able to dictate who got a domain and who didn't. In any nation, particularly one as fraight with racial strife as South Africa, this could lead directly to supression of speech on the Internet for that nation's people.

Then -- in a rather revolutionary move -- the administrator of the .za domain, a private South African citizen named Mike Lawrie (who helped get South Africa on the Internet in the first place, and is not paid for his administration duties), moved the .za zone file (which defines the structure of South African domain names and is necessary to alter, add or remove .za domains) offshore, where the South African government couldn't get at it. This basically renders the South African legislation useless -- they are literally fucked.

The intent is to leave control of the zone file in the hands of the people of South Africa as a whole, and of the Internet Committee for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the authority which parcels out top-level domains.*

This is an excellent example of ways in which we, the users, can keep the most democratic source of information in the world out of the hands of national governments, which are rapidly growing more and more repressive. Mike Lawrie is my new personal hero.

* ICANN is supposed to be made up of a mixture of people from the public, private and educational sectors, but it's rapidly turning into a puppet of the American government. We're going to ignore that fact for now -- Mr. Lawrie probably isn't aware of that, and there isn't much he could do about that anyway.

Comments

[lintilla.livejournal.com]

Dude. That ROCKS.

Good for Mike Lawrie.

[velveteen.livejournal.com]

YAY!

...

YAY!

[captainzap.livejournal.com]

I think ICANN, I think ICANN.

*chugga chugga choo choo!*

=runs from the impending thwaps=