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by FabCH 15 days ago
I mean, the government of Montenegro is a reasonable European democracy on its, admittedly slow, way to join the EU and is a NATO member.

It’s not really any different than this website we are now on being at the whim of the US government.
2 comments
belorn 15 days ago
The biggest difference is the role of ICANN and their willingness to regulate the management of a TLD. With ccTLD they have an official policy to be hands off and not dictate what a country will do with their top level domain. If the US government would start to mess with Verisign and how the registry handles domain, then ICANN is within their own policy to just move it somewhere else.

The government of Montenegro could, just like many other ccTLD, decide tomorrow that every registrant must be a citizen of Montenegro. Many countries do this today, and it is no big deal because it is the country of and ccTLD that dictate how their domains should be operated. They can raise prices by a factor of 100 if they wanted, decide on some form of ID for registration, or dictate that you must have a company located in the country. ICANN has no objection to any of that.

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FabCH 15 days ago
ICANN is a nonprofit in California. It doesn’t really have any power on its own. It only exists because everyone from browser developers to server operators to consumers agrees we need a central place to organize stuff.

If the US justice system issued a warrant telling Verisign to do X, what do you think the courts would do to ICANN if they tried to actively stop X from happening? At best, they would be politely asked to stop, at worst, they would get felony charges for obstruction.

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inigyou 15 days ago
It's very different. If the USA soon starts cancelling politically inconvenient domains, European ones will be safe. Just like Nazi propaganda domains would be censored in Europe, but are safe in the US.

Every domain has a country. It's as if every non-ccTLD was actually underneath .us. For legacy reasons .com .org etc were grandfathered in. gTLDs are also under .us for corrupt reasons.

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FabCH 15 days ago
Politically inconvenient domains are already routinely seized by the US and there are international agreements in place that allow cross-border takedowns.

Why do you think t.me got taken down? Montenegro doesn’t care about Telegram.

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inigyou 14 days ago
Maybe India gave them enough reasons to care.
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