TLD and the US domestic law

ICANN still do it.

TLD stands for Top level domain. This is part of the protocol schema that allows the Internet to function. Within the TCP/IP stack, the former can be conceptualised as the envelope (holding a data packet) while the latter is the address. This then can either be in numeric or else in the more human friendly format: e.g. bitter-crank.blogspot.com, The TLD ".com" is an example of an address used by a commercial entity, while an address such as news.bcc,co.uk uses the TLD ".uk" to denote a site connected to the United Kingdom.



The background to this is at the dawn of the Internet era, such addresses like the technology itself were under the de facto control of the US, due to the ARPA funding of the research that laid the foundation of the Internet (see book "Where Wizards stay up late"). However in the 90s, as the US moved to divest itself of the full control of Internet policy, a body known as ICANN was contracted to handle such matters by the US Dept. of Commerce. This would allow a diverse and multi-stakeholder international model of Internet governance to emerge.

Following this, the collection of state TLD also includes that of countries such as Iran, Syria and North Korea: nations unfriendly to the US. According to the ICANN website, https://www.icann.org/resources/press-material/release-2014-11-12-en, a trial judge in the District of Columbia Circuit court dismissed an attempt to seize their TLDs as assets ( due to an alleged connection to State terrorism in a series of co-joined cases). The ruling' reasoning was that, as per the noted initial action of the Dept. of Commerce, the TLDs were held under a type of contractual right and hence outside the remit of the remedy sought by the Plaintiffs of the actions.

If the case had been decided an other way, what would have this resulted in? Not the destruction of the internet in those countries. As due to the hierarchical yet diffuse nature of the Web addressing, it should have been possible for those countries to retain the addressing, but be based on a new root system within their country. However this would be a fragmentation which both would have decreased the open nature of the web and could have potentially laid the foundation of other authoritarian countries to opt out of the ICANN framework. This could have had a crippling effect on the innovation potential of the web.