Post by @jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net
The "OMG Apple and Google renamed Lake Ontario in their map apps" discussion is barking at the wrong tree, in my opinion. It's a childish presidential order from a bully. I mainly shrug. This is not a hill I care for and even less am willing to die on. Let's fight the cause, not the symptoms! #UnpopularOpinion I guess.
What worries me far more is the future of DNS and domain names, which ultimately are under US control and with the Trump administration it is being used to force the deletion of domain names from DNS that the Trump administration doesn't like. See https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/117200308433923512
Jan Wildeboer 😷
@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net
PIR, the Public Interest Registry ("Based in Reston, Virginia, Public Interest Registry is a nonprofit organization created by the Internet Society to manage the .ORG domain."), seems to have put autistici.org on status serverHold and that is why you cannot resolve their name anymore. This is what can happen to your .org domain name when the Trump administration decides to add you to the OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) list.
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@b2c I apologise for being Dutch and will recreate the image with correct grammar if you share what it should read :)
I'm not really aware of any - this is new to me - but since I'm keenly fond of decentralization and self-hosting, I need to learn more about it.
@jwildeboer
Well, not since the China/Russia ITU power play that scared everyone enough to put IANA under ICANN/ISOC multistakeholder control instead of US Commerce Dept oversight. The "always has been" format kind of undermines itself here — DNS governance is actually *less* under single-government control than it was a decade ago, specifically because the threat of it going the other way forced the transition.
The real "always has been" is that naming infrastructure has always been political. It just used to be one government's politics.
@jwildeboer forgive my ignorance. Is that really the case for all domais? It doesn’t seem to affect Chinese domains for example
@vanzick @jwildeboer Country code top level domains are generally considered somehow part of the sovereign aspects of a country as opposed to the more generic top level domains.
That, however, leaves us wondering things like why .su (Soviet Union) still exists and why each state in the EU gets a ccTLD (while each state in the US does not.)
Then there is my own top level domain proposal designed to break many of ICANN's rules:
@karlauerbach @vanzick @jwildeboer theoretically the US could delete ".ir", '.cu". ".gl", or anybody else they didn't like this week, but that would be the end of the DNS system and the end of their control.
@ghouston @vanzick @jwildeboer Rather than deleting top level domains, it can be much more "fun" usurping their contents, perhaps by taking over some root servers.
By-the-way, people forget that of the 13 root server clusters, the US gov't operates something like four of those 13. That's enough to do some "interesting" stuff. I wrote a bit about that 20 years back...
"What Could You Do With Your Own Root Server?"
Jon Postel and the Root Server Incident (1998)
In 1998, Jon Postel redirected root DNS traffic to test IANA's authority — the controversial incident that shaped DNS governance and its political fallout.
https://www.wired.com/2012/10/joe-postel/
https://www.robotdomainsearch.com/learn/1-4-postel-incident/
@jwildeboer When I was on the board of directors of ICANN I testified (multiple times) before committees of the US Senate.
One time a Senator gave me a hard time, so I returned the favor.
At one point I told that senator that if I could get nine of my fellow board members to agree with me we could pass a de facto worldwide domain name vs trademark law (actually a contract provision) that would supersede and override anything that a mere US Senator, such as himself, could ever enact.
I would note that ICANN screwed over the original .web top level domain back around year 2000 and recently assigned it to Verisign.
It is true, however, that internet users need not use the ICANN suite of root DNS servers. The competitive root movement kinda died, but it is coming back via things like Google's 8.8.8.8, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 and Xfinitiies 75.75.75.75, as well as via things like DNS ove HTTP (DOH) or DNS over TLS (DOT) in browsers.