[Asooka]

> I doubt that would run afoul of any laws

Sure it does. If the law says that domain X is not accessible in country Y, then ICANN has to scrub domain X from the list of domains when queried from country Y. Whether country Y has the jurisdiction to demand ICANN comply with their laws is a different matter, but I believe that technically serving "blocked" domains is probably against the relevant laws.

[gruez]

>Sure it does. If the law says that domain X is not accessible in country Y, then ICANN has to scrub domain X from the list of domains when queried from country Y.

But thing is that ICANN doesn't have a list of domains. All it has is a list of tlds and the dns servers for them. So if www.example.com. was blocked in some random country, the conversation with ICANN would go something like this:

    client: what's the IP for example.com?

    ICANN: I don't know, but you should ask verisign (the operator of the .com TLD)

You could argue that ICANN should have responded with "I don't know" (which will cause the recursion to stop), but that's sort of pointless because if you really wanted to know, you could ask ICANN to resolve some random.com domain and you would get the response that you need ("go ask verisign"). The company you want to block/sanction/threaten here is verisign (the actual company that controls the .com zone), not ICANN (the company that controls the root zone).