Earlier this evening ISOC-NY hosted a talk "Nations and Networks" by Milton Mueller http://www.livestream.com/isocny/video?clipId=pla_3df8a3b8-e2ee-489d-82d2-d5... At one point, he said that he'd had conversations with government insiders about their cracking of the whip on ICANN on matters like .xxx etc. Their response had been that the USA's main worry is that, unless they compromise with other governments on dns issues, the rest of the world may decide to jettison the USA root altogether.. of course, any messing with DNS smacks of hypocrisy after Hillary's rant about freedom and openness in the wake of the Google-China frisson a little while back.. I guess the argument would be that the freedom only applies to "legal" sites.. she also suggested in the same speech that anonymity was maybe a luxury that couldn't be afforded in a responsible internet.. http://themorningsidepost.com/2010/01/live-from-dc-21st-century-statecraft/ However it seems increasingly difficult to find a government that doesn't favor its sovereign right to maintain some kind of national blacklist, whether based on dns or ip. To illustrate the occasional foot in bucket effect of the latter he quoted the example of the virgin killer wikimedia incident http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~rlmw/iwf/Virgin_Killer.html - as noted there the proxy-based blocking system employed had the effect of rendering the entire UK unable to edit wikipedia. The Internet Society has issued a statement criticizing technical efforts to suppress Wikileaks: http://www.isoc-ny.org/p2/?p=1597 j -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Joly MacFie 218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast WWWhatsup NYC - http://wwwhatsup.com http://pinstand.com - http://punkcast.com VP (Admin) - ISOC-NY - http://isoc-ny.org ---------------------------------------------------------------