[Chapter-delegates] Input Request: DNS Blocking

[Joly MacFie]

Whether filtering/blocking  is desirable or advisable is a matter for
civil societies in sovereign nations. I think the Internet Society has
to recognize that.  We can advocate for freedom but we can't insist.
What we can insist is that such blocking/filtering be done without
monkeying with protocols such as DNS which is, in effect. spoofing.
And suggest, at least, transparency.

j

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Marcin Cieslak <saper at saper.info> wrote:
> 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
>



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