Can someone explain me why ICE has the power to enforce intellectual property laws on the internet? What does this have to do with immigration enforcement? Can ICE enforce other seemingly irrelevant laws? E.g. can ICE bust e.g. drug users, prostitution etc?
One of the main reasons that ICE believes they can exert this authority is because the .com/.net TLD namespace is owned and operated by Verisign, a US company. Further, the ICANN namespace is owned and operated by ICANN, a US company who, in fact, is also under the jurisdiction of attorney generals of California state [1].
As long as the namespace remains under the control of a centralized authority like the US, this will continue to be a reality. There may be some naysayers about solutions like Handshake, but frankly speaking, there's no person who would logically want their name to be able to be taken away by someone else. Your name is your identity and it is you. To be able to assert this with cryptography is a cypherpunk's dream.
Yeah, which seems ridiculous. As a first step, ICANN should be changed to some kind of international non-profit (I'm not even sure how you do that - do you just register it in Switzerland?).
Since they are not under a country code TLD, I think it really makes sense migrate .com, .net and .org to be 'international' TLDs (I think many people internationality basically already consider them to effectively be so) and US companies should be able to access equivalents under the ccTLD like .com.us, .net.us etc. if they wanted a US-specific one, just like every other country does. Then also, I really think all .gov, .mil and .edu and the other US-only TLDs should be phased out (they could just become redirects to .gov.us, .mil.us etc.). Having those TLDs as US-only just smacks of American exceptionalism - I understand the history and it made sense at the time, but became inappropriate as all the other ccTLDs started becoming used. They should have migrated to .us domains back then and deprecated .mil, .gov and so on.
It would be a bit messy, since .us is already delegated and there are already heaps of domains in that namespace which would have to be either retained as legacy or migrated after some time. So really the sooner the better! The US Government would probably have to buy the .us ccTLD back, create ones like com.us, net.us, org.us under it and then re-delegate them while operating .mil.us, .gov.us, .edu.us themselves.
> Then also, I really think all .gov, .mil and .edu and the other US-only TLDs should be phased out (they could just become redirects to .gov.us, .mil.us etc.). Having those TLDs as US-only just smacks of American exceptionalism
If other countries don't like it... why connect and use an American network? Why not build their own (and foot the research bill!).
I suspect that even the majority of Americans don't know that ICE handles customs as news stories rarely expand the acronym and the stories almost always deal with the immigration side of things.
