[Chapter-delegates] The Internet Society on the Wikileaks issue

[Michiel Leenaars]

Hello Christian,

a reasonable assumption would be that the .org domain name is far more
prone to be seized than a .ch-domain name - at which point no DNS
hosting provider could help them. PIR after all is legally based in the
USA. The chance is quite real that the United States government would at
some point seek to seize the name, like it has done early last week for
mere torrent hosts:

http://torrentfreak.com/us-government-responds-to-domain-seizures-ignores-the-big-question-101129 ) 

(these were all .net and .com, with the same USA-based company Verisign
as the registry). Moving Wikileaks to a Swiss domain name makes taking
down that new domain name at that level more difficult - I'm assuming
that seizing it would involve the government of Switzerland, and
possibly would have to involve an entire restructuring of the
relationship between SWITCH and the Swiss government. And since SWITCH
is doing an excellent job as is, and the Swiss government is rather
independent, that would take a lot of effort - beyond the scope of this
specific case, I would hope.

CDL> As a separate item ISOC might well find this is a good time to
CDL> start a consultation with members on the growing issue of DNS
CDL> interventions. These could become destabilising. 

I second that. Certainly governments and law enforcement agencies seem
to be at the gates of ICANN to make DNS intervention across their own
judicial system easier. A case like this is a strong reminder of certain
risks for the global free flow of information that would involve.

Kind regards,
Michiel Leenaars
Directeur 

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