South African Internet Blackout?

MdeGale writes "A tussle for control of the .za domain has sparked the possibility of a blackout for all .za sites. This article in the Independent online reports that Mike Lawrie -- the administrator of the ".za" domain -- would: 'have no alternative but to pull the plug on millions of email addresses and Internet sites if parliament passed the controversial Electronic Communications and Transactions Bill this week.' There is an excellent breakdown of the background situation at Politech. Basically the SA government wants to regulate the domain (and take over administering it). The Bill -- due to be passed this week -- would make this law, without Lawrie's agreement to the redelegation, as per ICANN practice."

Re:Yea and...???

[skaffen42]

You are missing the point here. This is a typical example of uninformed (and hopefully unenforceable) legislation that governments think up when they feel they are losing control of something. Read some of the background information on this case and you will realize how absurd the legislation is. For example you would not be able to change sub-domains to .za domain without government approval. Let's say you owned bar.za and wanted to create a sub domain foo.bar.za. According to the legislation you couldn't do it without approval. In the case of the South African government this is simply a continuation of their complete disregard of how things work in the real world. Read up on their South Africa's interesting policies on Aids (http://www.usatoday.com/news/healthscience/health / ids/2002-05-01-safrica-policy.htm) and you will see what I mean.

Re:Yea and...???

[palfreman]

You don't know what you are talking about and have obviously never administerd a DNS domain.

DNS is a distrubuted database lookup service. It doesn't belong to any country and doesn't have any status other than being more conveniant than aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd numbers. Anyone can, and people sometimes do, set a DNS root or a TLD.

It required the co-operation of other DNS administrators around the world (and not just in a titchy little backwater like South Africa) for the information about what hostname equals what number to be meaningful. It is not some farm on the veld that can be seized by a bunch of rent-seeking criminals - .za is not propertery.

Just because it looks like it could be grabbed does not actually mean it can be, not least because you have people like me in other countries who just won't accept that kind of abusive behavior - and without our support it is useless to you.

Start doing things properly of be cut off: a lesson for the whole of Southern Africa IMO.

Re:the large issue...

[jonadab]

> However, I have to ask what kind of response

> we would see from ICANN... Are we looking at

> a complete backout of .za? Will this be an

> across-the-board version of the Usenet Death

> Penalty

Nothing quite so dramatic as that. If ICANN does not approve of the change, the root nameservers simply won't change the way they delegate the .za domain. Remember, in terms of toplevel domains, if ICANN doesn't say that you are the authority, your authority is meaningless. The South African government can set up its new .za domain servers and declare them to be authoritative, and set up as many committees as it wants to manage them, but if the ICANN nameservers delegate .za elsewhere, then every name lookup in the world will look elsewhere for .za domains. In particular, everyone will continue to use the existing servers managed by the current administrator, as long as ICANN continues to delegate to them and they continue to function.

Therein lies the problem...

The only serious danger to continued functioning of the internet in South Africa (and this is a very real possibility) would be if the government legally forced the current .za administrator to shut down the existing nameservers. In that case, all name lookups in the .za domain would fail, until he turned them back on or ICANN delegated to a new administrator.

Probably the people who drafted the legislation believe that they can force ICANN to delegate to their new official servers, but ICANN says they will not delegate to technically incompetent administrators, and there is reason to believe them.

Note that everything else internet-related in South Africa would continue to work, except for domain name lookups. Anything you can do with just IP addresses would still work. Web servers would still work, but could not be accessed using domain names. (You could use the IP numbers, if you know them.) In a pinch, you could probably even still exchange email, but it would be problematic for non-technical users because there would be no way to determine the correct mail server from a domain-based email address. So you would have to know the IP address of the mail server in question. Et cetera.