[Chapter-delegates] Input Request: DNS Blocking

[Marcin Cieslak]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2011, Joly MacFie wrote:

> To my way of thinking there is a quid pro quo here. Governments have
> the right to make laws that apply to the Internet in their countries,
> while at the same time the Internet globally has laws, open standards,
> protocols arrived at by international consensus which Governments
> should recognize and accept.

I disagree on this. We've had a discussion on this with our prime minister
and of the points we raised is the limited sovereign power over the network
as a whole. Of course, as in Orwell, some governments are more equal in this 
than others.

It could be useful to distinguish between relatively blind and stupid network
and the endpoints. The endpoints can be usually subjected to the jurisidiction
of the country they reside or operate in, and sometimes they can be subjected
to the global coordinated effort of the network community - see
attempts to delete child pornography sites done my the German activist
group AK Zensur[1].

Blocking is usually rolled out because the perceived wrongdoing of
the blocked resource is not universally shared among the legislations,
unlike child pornography.

Blocking is being perceived as a solution in a situation  where one
goverment disagrees with another legislature about what's wrong "on
the Internet". The most obvious example is online gambling - the
government want to block all online gambling sites EXCEPT those
what pay taxes in the country in question.

I usually compare those attempts to regulate the network this way
to the (in)famous Red Flag legislation in Great Britain[2]. One of
the pro-filtering groups in our country used the argument "that
even if one child can be saved from evil, filtering is a good
solution".  The answer for this is - are you going to mandate
that cars have to be made safe to the children on the road?

//Marcin

[1] http://ak-zensur.de/2009/05/loeschen-funktioniert.html (in
German).
[2] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Red_Flag_Act