[dns-operations] New U.S. Senate Bill re DNS Blocking

[Paul Hoffman]

At 10:12 PM +0000 9/21/10, Livingood, Jason wrote:
>Not sure if many folks have yet taken notice of this:
>http://judiciary.senate.gov/legislation/upload/CombatingOnlineInfringementAndCounterfeitsAct.pdf
>
>Included is:
>Ša service providerŠor other operator of a domain name system server shall take reasonable steps that will prevent a domain name from resolving to that domain name's Internet protocol address;

Jason, I can't believe that you avoided the opportunity to play armchair lawyer/politician here. Move over and let me show you how it's done.

The quote from above is from a section that only applies to "nondomestic domains". In the case of a "domestic domain", the registry "shall suspend operation of, and lock, the domain name". Neither "domestic" nor "nondomestic" are defined in this early draft of the bill, and one can imagine that either (a) they will be defined badly in a later draft, (b) they will not be defined in the final bill, but will instead be inferred from some other law that has absolutely nothing to do with names, or (c) they ditch the difference between the two.

Senator Leahy is actually one of the more clueful about Internet technology, and has had very-cluded people on his staff as of a year ago. When I spoke to a staffer last year, he knew who VeriSign was, who GoDaddy was, and understood the difference between a registry and a registrar. He also hinted that he had spoken to VeriSign staff or lobbyists. One can expect many changes will happen, probably in a more technically justifiable direction, although probably still not making any DNS admin, registrar, or registry at all happy.

On a more serious note: this bill or one that feels a lot like it could pass with minimal effort if a bit of anti-counterfeit-drug wording gets sprinkled in, given that Obama's staff have latched onto that topic.