October 13, 2007

Toward 'Transnational' Internet Control

A few years ago there was a push for 'transnational' control of the Internet. Is that President No-Small-Ball's next Big Idea? (Keeping my fingers crossed: sarcastic hyperbole about this administration can be hard to achieve.)

As it happens, the administration has just contributed to the transnationalist case:
After a Marin County website was hacked to redirect users to a pornographic Web site, the GSA stepped in and obstructed every state and local website in the state of California
For the children of course:
The General Services Administration, which shut down the sites, apologized for the inconvenience on Thursday and said it would try to find a more targeted solution for similar problems in the future.

"GSA is responsible for the integrity of all the .gov Web sites it manages," the agency said in a statement. "The potential exposure of pornographic material to the citizens and tens of thousands of children in California was a primary motivator for GSA to request immediate corrective action."
If I were reading this in Frankfurt, Tokyo, Beijing, Rio, etc., I wouldn't be feeling very supportive of the USA as a fiduciary for domain-name registration.

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