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Much of the time I have a blog entry due, I find myself casting about for good topics.  Sometimes I turn to (my literally dozens of) Twitter followers for inspiration.  Sometimes I go whine to Jen, our PR manager and my de facto editor, about how hard it is to think up new subjects regularly, and she reminds me of a topic I came up with weeks ago and promptly forgot.

This week, though, I find myself with an obvious topic but afraid to touch it.  But as my wife will attest, discretion has never been my strong suit, so here goes.

Last month, the U.S. government seized of dozens of domain names allegedly associated with “the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and copyrighted works.”  Based on the description of the operation on ICE’s web site, the case against the owners of these web sites appears strong.  And I’m very sympathetic to the plight of copyright holders—as a copyright holder myself, who often finds his works posted on web sites outside U.S. law enforcement jurisdiction.

But these seizures accomplish more than just shutting down a web site.

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Matt and I are fortunate to have an august group of listeners to our Ask Mr. DNS Podcast.  More often than not, when we don’t know the answer to a tough DNS question—and if you listen, you know that happens alarmingly frequently—a listener will send us an email lifeline.  Or sometimes a listener will provide insider knowledge about an issue we’ve commented on.  Matt and I feel both flattered by and enormously grateful for the attention of so many smart, accomplished people.

I bring this up because we recently received a message from kc claffy, who falls squarely into that “smart, accomplished” demographic.  kc works at SDSC, the San Diego Supercomputing Center, which means a) she’s wicked smart and 2) she has the good sense to live in the lovely San Diego area. She’s done a lot of work with CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis—and whose acronym I imagine she pronounces very carefully when explaining what she does to a TSA agent—including a fascinating study of the crazy mix of useless query traffic received by a root name server.

kc asked Matt and me for our opinion on an issue related to the expansion of the top-level namespace.  As I’ve written, ICANN has begun adding more top-level domains.  We recently saw the addition of TLDs that use IDNA to encode non-ASCII characters, and ICANN’s also planning to allow folks to register lots of the plain-Jane, ASCII variety of TLDs, too.

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This week, the changes didn't wait until I got home.  I left for Dallas on Monday, and by Tuesday the Public Interest Registry announced that they'd signed the .org zone on an experimental basis.  Theirs is the first "open" generic top-level domain to be signed, as well as the largest signed zone.  That's obviously great if you run a subdomain of .org and are keen to sign it, but it's even good for folks with subdomains of other gTLDs, since it'll put pressure on their registries to sign those zones, too.

Then on Wednesday, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, or NTIA, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce that has responsibility for oversight of the root zone, announced that they'd work with ICANN and VeriSign to sign the root by the end of the year.

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Ariel Rabkin (of my alma mater, Berkeley) wrote an interesting, thoughtful article on Internet governance recently.  It argues that U.S. government control of the root zone, through the Department of Commerce's oversight of IANA, perhaps isn't such a bad thing.  The U.S., after all, has done a good job so far, eliciting few complaints.  The First Amendment helps us resist calls to use such control as a bludgeon in the service of censorship.  An international organization might yield to covert pressure to enact restrictions on content.

While Mr. Rabkin's arguments appeal to me, I wonder how much my view is clouded by being an American.  Furthermore, I tend to think that some of his points would have rung hollow just months ago, before the current administration took office.

On the other hand, I've thought about alternatives to the current governance model before and never come up with one I felt sure would work better.  Is the current arrangement "the worst form except for all those others that have been tried"?