back to article ICANN can't hand over Iran's internet, bomb victims told

It's not possible to hand over Iran's internet because it doesn't own it, a Washington DC court has been told in a mind-boggling submission to terrorism victims. Lawyers for nine US citizens injured in an Iran-financed bombing in Jerusalem back in 1997 have turned to the internet in an effort to recoup millions of dollars …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Americans

    They do like their lawyers and legal cases don't they?

    1. Mr C

      Re: Americans

      That's funny that you should mention that

      We just had a good hard laugh about the exact same thing here at the office.

      Trying to hold a country accountable is one thing, but then going after old statues (with historical relevance) or a entire countries' domain name - seriously? Who do they think they are?

      If they would win this case the implication of the kind of precedence that this would set would be staggering.

      Imagine being able to hold an entire country ransom because in some way or another it has caused you harm (and i can think of many types of harm, sky's the limit)

      There's already talk about creating a "2nd internet" from countries that don't want to be held hostage to the whims of the US or any other country that currently has the power over top-level domains, and if anything gets the blood pumping it would be a case like this.

      In the end this will benefit no-one except those 9 individuals and a army of lawyers.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Americans

        Following the logic in this case; if they won you could give a good case for giving Russia to the citizens of Ukraine. That would be interesting to watch from a safe distance. From orbit, possibly.

        1. JDoubler

          Re: Americans

          That would be the begin of the end of the internet and for sure the NSA dont want to give up its monitoring possibilities for anyone else.

    2. Mark 85

      Re: Americans

      Actually, I don't think we do. Many of us would be very happy if suddenly all the ambulance chasers, scum in a cheap (or expensive) suit, and pond scum would suddenly go away. They have contributed to making our Constitution irrelevant. Also the cost of goods a lot higher because of the need for liability insurance.

      1. BongoJoe

        Re: Americans

        Oh yes. And the ridiculous health and safety warnings because of all these.

        For example yesterday I took delivery of a new drum stool and on the sheet of paper with the H&S stuff there was only room for six warnings in each language.

        The sixth warning was, and I kid you not, a warning about playing the drums during an earthquake as things could topple over...

        1. graeme leggett Silver badge

          Re: Americans

          Not an invitation to imitate Keith Moon, then?

    3. Fungus Bob

      Re: Americans

      "They do like their lawyers and legal cases don't they?"

      Not really. The only reason we don't kill and eat the lawyers is because they taste like shit.

      1. VBF

        Re: Americans

        Maybe.......but they're YOUR shit. Perhaps you should invest in some "Pooper Scoopers"?

        1. Fungus Bob

          Re: Americans

          *All* lawyers are shit. Our smell worse.

  2. d3rrial

    P2P distributed Nameservices?

    Namecoin for example could help with Problems like that.. (altough I'm not a fan of Namecoin myself, distributed DNS could be useful, if not essential at some point)

    1. Guus Leeuw

      Re: P2P distributed Nameservices?

      "distributed DNS" - Technically, I'm not sure if that is at all possible... But then I operate as a Project Manager nowadays...

  3. Pete 2 Silver badge

    A fine idea

    I don't think the USA wants to dip its toe into who "owns" TLDs. And it really doesn't want to enable their seizure as compensation. Especially as the US embassy in London owes £7 Mil in unpaid fines.

    That sound you can hear? Boris rubbing his hands

    ref: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-23266149

    1. phuzz Silver badge

      Re: A fine idea

      The simple answer would just be for the British Embassy to stop paying traffic fines in the US, until they got it up to a similar level.

      1. ian 22

        Re: A fine idea

        I seem to recall a treaty giving diplomatic personnel "immunity", it being immunity from traffic fines, prosecution for any number of felonies, etc. So yes, the British embassy need not pay traffic fines, as the American embassy need not.

        In other news, the taking of diplomats hostage as Iran did, is considered bad form, even an act of war.

    2. Vector

      Re: A fine idea

      "I don't think the USA wants to dip its toe into who 'owns' TLDs."

      Actually, I doubt the USA much cares about that fight. ".us" is very much a second-class citizen on the internet. The bulk of US domains use the generic TLDs (.com, .net, etc). Even the government uses .gov and the military .mil.

      That being said, this suit is pointless and shows a profound ignorance of how the internet works. Domain names are just pointers to IP numbers. The IP number is the actual address, it's just hard for people to remember.

      So, even if these people managed to win their case, the net result would most likely be that Iran would "balkanize" their network using their own naming convention. I doubt they'd even hesitate since it would serve their censorship goals quite well. Thus the floodgates would open to geographic partitioning of the Internet.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If they had won the case then we, as victims of the IRA bombings, could sue and then take control of the US TLDs! Only seems fair considering the massive funding that that terrorism benefited from directly from the US. Or how about the victims of the Iraq war where the US et al terrorised Iranian families for years based on lies told by the US government...or how about the war against al qaeda who were firing weapons and ammo supplied by the US against the US troops...The US should sue itself.

    1. Ted Treen
      Megaphone

      Fun!

      "The US should sue itself."

      If it did, and then lost with costs awarded against it, then the US-that-won would have to brief lawyers to extract costs from the US-that-lost, whilst not affecting the finances of the US-that-won.

      It's a lawyer's wet dream!

      New Rollers, Ferraris all round, plus Learjets, yachts etc. for decades to come.

      1. chivo243 Silver badge
        Trollface

        Re: Fun!

        I think that is about to happen, one half of the US politicos are thinking of suing the leader of the other half, no names needed I don't think?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Fun!

          Technically, he's the leader of both halves - there's only one President in the US, and he's President for everyone in the US, even the people who voted for McCain/Palin or Romney/Ryan.

    2. Naughtyhorse

      here here!

      and the Afghans, and the Iraqis, and the Vietnamese, and Laotians(?) Norks... all that way back to the confederated states.

      Sic 'em shyster

    3. ian 22

      Optional title

      So the corrected name is ICANN'T?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The case is mind boggling on several levels.

    It is clear that despite any assurances to the contrary US courts can intervene and have massive effects on companies and individuals through ICANN even if they have no presence or deallings of any sort in the US.

    The second is that this interference is very political. The supposed involvement of Iran in the 1997 Jresusalem bombing is tenuous, political and partisan in application. The connection is simply that Iran supported Hamas at the time of the attack. The court case against Iran was undefended so lost by default. The jurisdiction of a case related to supporting a group in a different country by yet another country allegedly leading to an attack in a third country none of which were in the US is challenging to say the least. Even to defend the case woudl be to acknowledge jurisdiction which I can understand any country even Britain being reluctant to do. The US has supported much worse groups than Hamas, Hamas is a quasi state actor. The US classified HAMAS as a terrorist organisation after the attack so it would have been legal for even US citizens to support HAMAS up to and after the attack concerned. There is no prospect of victims of US sponsored terroism such as blowing up Cuban airliners or war crimes by US sponsored states such as Israel recovering any money.

    The lesson for any country not closely allied to the US must be that the current system is dominated by the US, politicla in nature and may be appleid against them.

    1. James12345

      War Crimes

      Rather that making ignorant claims about Israel, it might be better to look a bit closer to home when talking about war crimes:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_war_crimes

      1. frank ly

        @James12345 Re: War Crimes

        One third of a sentence (if that) gets your antennae quivering. You're very sensitive for some reason. How do you know that the AC is British? Even if he/she is, then does this mean that nobody who's armed forces have ever committed war crimes can make any comment about any other country in this way? Can you tell us what your nationality is, so we know when to tell you to shut up about other countries?

      2. d3rrial

        Re: War Crimes

        @James12345

        I think his point was more that every country with an active military commits war crimes one time or another. Great Britain just as much as Israel or any given other country that has been at war at some point.

        1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
          Trollface

          Re: War Crimes

          The case for Israel is made of four propositions that should always be presented in the correct escalating order.

          -- We rock

          -- They suck

          -- You suck

          -- Everything sucks

          That's it. Now you know everything that it took me a lifetime to learn. The rest is details; filling in the dotted lines.

      3. Naughtyhorse

        Re: War Crimes

        or just watch the news! you fucking degenerate

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: War Crimes

        "Rather that making ignorant claims about Israel, it might be better to look a bit closer to home when talking about war crimes:"

        According to the bullshit source you cited (wikipedia ffs) most of those "war crimes" that happened during living memory were commited by individual soldiers (or on the orders of an officer acting without direct contact with his superiors) and were not the result of direct orders given to the military, so the country was not responsible for the actions of those individuals and they were punished accordingly i.e. not a british war crime.

        I am not saying that the British never commited war crimes, they have, and probably still do, but using wikipedia as a source for your argument is lazy and in most cases completely wrong anyway!

        1. asdf

          Re: War Crimes

          But its only a war crime if you lose. Pretty ballsy to be hanging Nazis for war crimes while there were still a significant amount of detectable isotopes in Hiroshima at the time. Even Chuck Yeager said they knew they had better win the war because after he had been ordered to strafe civilians losing probably meant the end of a rope.

    2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Holmes

      The US has supported much worse groups than Hamas

      Currently supporting MEK, a frankly unhinged group bent on blowing shit up in Tehran. But they are "our" terrorists, and we cannot sue ourselves. Can we?

      Did I mention that Iran was already found guilty of having done 9/11? It's true! So it wasn't Saddam? No wait. Bin Laden? Err.... I don't know any longer ....

      In faireness, it was not done by the FedGov court but by the court of a piece of land that is strongly lubed by the largesse of certain Middle Eastern Democracies.

    3. Naughtyhorse

      Of course that case was made

      mr justice thingammy-stein heard the evidence from the prosecution lawyer something-berg and they decided Rubin deserved a TLD!

      fucking disgraceful even by their standards

  6. rh587

    289 pages? Seems like a long winded way for ICANN to say. "F-off, don't be so stupid."

  7. HereWeGoAgain

    I think .com should be given to the Iranians

    America committed a heinous act of terrorism when it knowingly shot down the Iran Air passenger aircraft.

    It is a nonsense to suggest that America did not know exactly what it was doing.

  8. Fred Goldstein

    ICANN is only consultative

    DNS is distributed. You can point to any resolver you want, and it can point to any TLD authority it wants. For obvious reasons essentially all public Internet services accept the ICANN delegation of authority for TLDs. But DNS operators don't have to. So if for some reason ICANN un-delegated .ir, then the rest of the world could simply ignore them. It isn't the ITU whose numbers have legal authority, it's a consulting body whose recommendations only work because they're sane enough.

    Dot-sex was a plain fraud case and the registry made a mistake; it's not precedent.

    1. kierenmccarthy

      Re: ICANN is only consultative

      It's a frequent argument that if a decision was made that wasn't in the Internet's overall best interests that the rest of the domain name system would just ignore it.

      But (fortunately) that theory has not been put to the test.

      It is all too probable that if the legal decision did come down that the dot-ir registry had to reassigned to someone else that the vast majority of the Internet would simply reflect that decision under the perfectly logical reasoning that it is an unusual and closely defined event and that the bigger interest lies in keeping the Internet a single entity in terms of addressing.

      Any DNS operators that decided not to follow the changes passed down from the root servers would most likely find themselves on the outside of the global Internet and unable to survive for very long.

      Since there is absolutely zero agreement within the Internet community about what constitutes a good decision or a bad decision, or what they would actually do if there was a "bad" decision, it strikes me that the big likelihood is that everyone would just accept the change and move on.

      Of course, it is very unlikely that would ever happen: the US government would be able to put a stop to any transfer of a ccTLD and it almost certainly would do so because the international blowback would be immense. But I really don't know that the Internet community could be relied upon to "do the right thing" were the improbable to happen.

      1. Vic

        Re: ICANN is only consultative

        it strikes me that the big likelihood is that everyone would just accept the change and move on

        I really, really doubt that.

        Now I've no real interest in the .ir domain - AFAIK, I've never even performed a DNS lookup against it before today, saving perhaps for rDNS lookmups during spam attacks against my server.

        But I'm buggered if I'm going to let some tin-pot US judge decide to put a black hole into my access to the Internet. He doesn't have the authority to restict my lookups into a third country.

        So if this were to happen, .ir would suddenly get an entry in my nameserver - a couple of NS records pointing to ns.irnic.ir (193.189.122.83) and a.nic.ir (193.189.123.2).

        And then any posturinf in the US wouuld have zero effect whatsoever.

        Am I alone in thinking like this? I really doubt it.

        Vic.

  9. Justin Pasher

    Minor correction

    There are a lot more than just 13 root name servers

    http://blog.icann.org/2007/11/there-are-not-13-root-servers/

    1. kierenmccarthy

      Re: Minor correction

      Yes, you're right, there are many more than 13 actual servers - there are hundreds.

      But there are only 13 "operators" i.e. only 13 organizations that get to decide who runs those servers and what information they store. And 10 of those are in the United States and hence subject to US law.

  10. Stevie

    Bah!

    So, if I understand the ramifications of recent legal precedent and the current idiocy:

    ICANN does not own the property it sells. Furthermore, ICANN claims the property does not in fact exist (otherwise, how could it be that *no-one* can own it?). Add to that the fact that ICANN is, under US law, a person in certain important legal respects.

    By gad, what we have here is a penniless scam artist who is surely only minutes away from demanding public assistance.

    With clear evidence of recidivism (this is not the first time ICANN has sold a non-existent piece of property I'm told), why isn't ICANN (in the form of its board of directors) in jail for fraud and being a threat to the (re)public good?

    1. Yes Me Silver badge

      Re: Bah!

      "ICANN does not own the property it sells."

      I suspect that if you read the small print, what they are selling is the right to use a slot in a database. But they didn't ever sell the right to use the slot named "ir"; ccTLD registrations cannot be sold by ICANN, because they have always been presumed to be for the exclusive use of the territory concerned, with any dispute settled within that territory.

      The name "ir" is defined by an ISO standard (IS 3166). The right to use it, I think you will find, is a matter of international law and the UN Charter.

      Quite different from the name "xxx", which came out of a process defined by ICANN.

  11. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    Why not go all-lunar on them?

    Seize the whole thing by court order (not physically), subdivide it up legally, and then sell off deeds for each square inch.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Best Hippocracy Money Can Buy

    USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655. The commander claimed an Airbus A300 on a scheduled flight and route was thought to be an F-14 Tomcat. President H W Bush said "I will never apologize for the United States — I don't care what the facts are... I'm not an apologize-for-America kind of guy."

  13. JassMan
    FAIL

    Surely the real problem is...

    not that loss of .ir would affect the government of Iran but that the main users of domain names within the name space are to varying degrees, innocent companies and corporations trying to earn an honest dollar. Sure, some may or may not have supported the regime at the time of the bombings etc. but punishing non-government organisations is not going to influence the government themselves one iota.

    1. HarshKarma

      Re: Surely the real problem is...

      "not that loss of .ir would affect the government of Iran but that the main users of domain names within the name space are to varying degrees, innocent companies and corporations trying to earn an honest dollar rial."

      FTFY

  14. J.G.Harston Silver badge

    Coming up next, the international dialling code +98 is taken away from Iran, as well as the right for people in Iran wanting to get post from other countries to have letters with an address ending in "IRAN" to be sent to Iran, followed by the removal of the right of Iran to call itself Iran.

    1. cortland

      re Coming up next...

      Is that a Pharsi-ing?

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