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Interesting, I thought for stuff like these - you just need to complain to ICANN. Very interesting to see that Meta feel that it needs to go to court for this.

Interesting, I thought for stuff like these - you just need to complain to ICANN. Very interesting to see that Meta feel that it needs to go to court for this. Does this mean that ICANN is broken / does not have the capability to properly take care of these things?

elwebmaster 4y ago
These domains belong to countries, their own sovereign namespace in the Internet. The countries have designated a company to manage the space on their behalf and that’s the company which has authority over the domains. Nothing to do with ICANN “capability”.
noirscape 4y ago
ICANN is an American institution (this'll matter in a bit) that basically manages the entirety of domain names. Broadly speaking, there's two kinds of domain names; gTLDs and ccTLDs[0]. gTLDs (general TLDs, so your .com domains) give you some fairly basic rights; when you buy a domain name you will always have the right to transfer it to a new registrar at no charge and IIRC the domain registrar can't suspend you with no reason given (although any reason is sufficient, including "we just don't like you"). ccTLDs (country code TLDs, so .uk for example) on the other hand have the same rights on paper, but not in practice. This mostly comes down to the fact that ICANN as an institution doesn't want to be at the center of a diplomatic incident, so they just allow countries to do whatever they want with their TLDs. Some run them like any old registrar (or subcontract it out for profit), others restrict purchases to just government entities, others go midway and use the TLD only for government websites while letting regular entities buy a subdomain from a known domain name (.co.uk for example). With a ccTLD (which are the domains freenom chiefly provides), as long as the government you're getting the rights from approves of your actions, you can basically run it however you want because of this. ICANN rarely if ever moves against ccTLDs (although freenom has already been punished in the past by ICANN over their ccTLD behavior, so it does happen sometimes.) [0]: There's also a third category which mostly just comprises .gov, which is the TLD used by the US government (why the US government gets access to that TLD instead of say, .gov.usa like all other countries, is for reasons beyond me).
- zinekeller 4y ago
  > There's also a third category which mostly just comprises .gov, which is the TLD used by the US government (why the US government gets access to that TLD instead of say, .gov.usa like all other countries, is for reasons beyond me). 1) gov.us exists (but not used) and 2) the DNS system was developed in the US intially for their academe and the military. For example, .arpa, which is now used for certain DNS and non-DNS management, is actually for ARPA (now DARPA).
- account42 4y ago
  > ccTLDs (country code TLDs, so .uk for example) on the other hand have the same rights on paper, but not in practice. This mostly comes down to the fact that ICANN as an institution doesn't want to be at the center of a diplomatic incident, so they just allow countries to do whatever they want with their TLDs. You're saying this as if it's a bad thing that countries can get to make their own rules for their dedicated namespaces.
  - noirscape 4y ago
    I'm not saying it's a bad thing inherently. It makes some degree of sense, but the problem is that there's many countries, usually third world, that sold their namespace off to a shady registrar like Freenom, usually to either try and give their disastrous economies a financial injection or to line the pockets of some corrupt government official. (Or as is often the case, both at the same time.) There's no process in place to prevent that sort of thing from happening, and it's ultimately a bad outcome for all involved. It results in the ccTLD of a country with legitimate citizens getting a bad reputation for transmitting unreasonable amounts of spam (since Freenom gives it away to anyone who asks) and it often doesn't fix the economy of said country anyway.
    - account42 4y ago
      Countries selling making bad deals when selling off their resources is of course not a good thing, but I'd rather risk that happening than give the US or any one central entity even more power to dictate who can or cannot have an online presence. At least with domain names the countries in question could technically take the TLD back even if it would be a legal shitstorm - not so much with physical resources that have been removed.

elwebmaster 4y ago

These domains belong to countries, their own sovereign namespace in the Internet. The countries have designated a company to manage the space on their behalf and that’s the company which has authority over the domains. Nothing to do with ICANN “capability”.

noirscape 4y ago

ICANN is an American institution (this'll matter in a bit) that basically manages the entirety of domain names. Broadly speaking, there's two kinds of domain names; gTLDs and ccTLDs[0]. gTLDs (general TLDs, so your .com domains) give you some fairly basic rights; when you buy a domain name you will always have the right to transfer it to a new registrar at no charge and IIRC the domain registrar can't suspend you with no reason given (although any reason is sufficient, including "we just don't like you"). ccTLDs (country code TLDs, so .uk for example) on the other hand have the same rights on paper, but not in practice. This mostly comes down to the fact that ICANN as an institution doesn't want to be at the center of a diplomatic incident, so they just allow countries to do whatever they want with their TLDs. Some run them like any old registrar (or subcontract it out for profit), others restrict purchases to just government entities, others go midway and use the TLD only for government websites while letting regular entities buy a subdomain from a known domain name (.co.uk for example). With a ccTLD (which are the domains freenom chiefly provides), as long as the government you're getting the rights from approves of your actions, you can basically run it however you want because of this. ICANN rarely if ever moves against ccTLDs (although freenom has already been punished in the past by ICANN over their ccTLD behavior, so it does happen sometimes.) [0]: There's also a third category which mostly just comprises .gov, which is the TLD used by the US government (why the US government gets access to that TLD instead of say, .gov.usa like all other countries, is for reasons beyond me).

zinekeller 4y ago
> There's also a third category which mostly just comprises .gov, which is the TLD used by the US government (why the US government gets access to that TLD instead of say, .gov.usa like all other countries, is for reasons beyond me). 1) gov.us exists (but not used) and 2) the DNS system was developed in the US intially for their academe and the military. For example, .arpa, which is now used for certain DNS and non-DNS management, is actually for ARPA (now DARPA).
account42 4y ago
> ccTLDs (country code TLDs, so .uk for example) on the other hand have the same rights on paper, but not in practice. This mostly comes down to the fact that ICANN as an institution doesn't want to be at the center of a diplomatic incident, so they just allow countries to do whatever they want with their TLDs. You're saying this as if it's a bad thing that countries can get to make their own rules for their dedicated namespaces.
- noirscape 4y ago
  I'm not saying it's a bad thing inherently. It makes some degree of sense, but the problem is that there's many countries, usually third world, that sold their namespace off to a shady registrar like Freenom, usually to either try and give their disastrous economies a financial injection or to line the pockets of some corrupt government official. (Or as is often the case, both at the same time.) There's no process in place to prevent that sort of thing from happening, and it's ultimately a bad outcome for all involved. It results in the ccTLD of a country with legitimate citizens getting a bad reputation for transmitting unreasonable amounts of spam (since Freenom gives it away to anyone who asks) and it often doesn't fix the economy of said country anyway.
  - account42 4y ago
    Countries selling making bad deals when selling off their resources is of course not a good thing, but I'd rather risk that happening than give the US or any one central entity even more power to dictate who can or cannot have an online presence. At least with domain names the countries in question could technically take the TLD back even if it would be a legal shitstorm - not so much with physical resources that have been removed.