Re: [nznog] PCH & ISC, defenders of the DNS.

There are indeed precisely 13 root servers. See http://www.root-servers.org/. I think you're confusing root servers with authority-only servers for TLD zones, and a purported threat against the root servers with domain take-downs ordered by particular nations' law-enforcement. If you want a domain with a registry managed in a local jurisdiction, go talk to NZRS. There exist gTLDs currently that are operated outside the US. Soon there apparently may be more. It's a mistake to think that Internet infrastructure is somehow exempt from the law. I won't contradict your legal analysis for the case you mentioned because I am not a lawyer, I don't know the facts of the case and (last but not least!) this is an operations list. Sent from my Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 On 2012-03-31, at 16:41, Sam Russell wrote:

The article said there are only 13 root servers so I'm not sure that the article was sure what it's talking about.

The controversy at the moment seems to be the extradition of the 23-year-old admin of tvshack.net to the USA. The server wasn't hosted in the USA, but having a .net domain meant that he could be tried under US law. As a generic top level domain (gTLD), a .net domain shouldn't be bound by the whims of any one country, but only by ICANN/IANA.

The problem is that the gTLDs are all hosted in the USA, and judges are interpreting this to mean that websites with gTLDs are bound by US law. This is the same as if the printing of our phone books was outsourced to China, and then China extraditing the Tibetian embassy because their phone number is in a Chinese-printed phone book.

tl;dr 60+ year old judges don't know how the Internet works, and this is just the next part of the slippery slope that geo-IP boundaries have put us on

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 1, 2012, at 6:28 AM, Joe Abley wrote:

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On 2012-03-31, at 06:00, Sam Russell wrote:

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I enjoyed the article, but it really made me wonder whether this would be happening if the gTLD servers weren't under US jurisdiction

What are "the gTLD servers", and why do you think they are related to the threat that article was talking about?

Joe