No. It's not a disaster. Just the end of the .com/.net/.org era. As soon as people realize that .com/.net/.org are not neutral, but under US jurisdication, they will move to other TLDs operated in countries with more liberal laws.

Laws can change. I think it's well time to start thinking about how to organize the internet so that it routes around governments even more easily.

Eh. You don't have to "route around" this currently, just use a DNS resolver outside of the country that re-introduces domains which get taken out by oppressive governments.

Nobody wants to do this, though, as it would destroy the fabric of the internet as we know it or something. But a simpler method would just incur more government push back in an arms race around censorship. Do what the chinese [citizens] do: go covert.

This is actually an interesting idea to me. Forgive me for not being very knowledgeable about the DNS, so if somebody could correct me, I would appreciate it.

What happens if people start selectively paying attention to the ICANN root servers? For instance, my computer is set to use google's DNS. What happens if the DNS admins at google decide that they're going to just ignore the update from ICANN?

And what happens if there is a second-tier DNS that crops up specifically to thwart attempts at messing around with the records? (Honestly, domains being 'seized' should be treated like faulty equipment. If a drive starts bailing out, you replace it. To me, it sounds like the US gov't's ability to modify the DNS at their will is a click-of-death on the DNS)

First of all, let's be clear: the root servers are owned and operated by various entities in countries all around the world. The root zone file is the sole domain of the Department of Commerce of the United States of America. So you'd have to ignore all of them, and i'm not completely sure the US Government wouldn't force Google to apply the one correct root zone file (after all, Google is such a powerhouse you could complain of a monopoly of internet control or influence).

Potential legal issues aside, what you end up with is a New Internet. Of course routes all remain the same, but nobody refers to addresses or routes: they use host names. Thus you run a huge risk of networked applications just not working, which would affect everything from entertainment to commerce to government services and god knows what else (what if medical devices in hospitals needed to retrieve a firmware upgrade and couldn't connect to the right host?).

In practice there would be no technical hurdle to do this. It's simple to just configure your domain name server to include some records, leave out some records and change others. Some people do this if their ISP redirects failed lookups to some advertising-laden homepage, for example. But on a large scale, the modification of the naming system to one's personal tastes has broad-reaching negative consequences related to availability of hosts and the functional and legal consequences therein. On a personal scale (modifying only your own name server results), you get to connect to your poker site again. I prefer the latter solution. If operating systems just started including a simple GUI to modify their personal domain name caches we probably wouldn't need an alternate dns root.

This is precisely the goal of projects like p2p-dns[1] and AlterNIC[2]. It is mostly a chicken-and-egg problem of getting users to resolve non-standard TLDs, so that those non-standard TLDs are registered to things users actually care about, etc, etc.

[1] http://dot-p2p.org/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlterNIC

> just use a DNS resolver outside of the country that re-introduces domains which get taken out by oppressive governments.

But outside of which country? You'd have to read the local news for every country in the world that currently has them, every day, if not hourly.

In theory yes. In practice they move to Libya.

Indeed, extensions like .ME and .CO have a bright future, same for domain hacks (except for .US ones).

It hardly matters what the laws are when politicians wipe their asses with the constitution.

Bitcoin is in for it as soon as it gains any reasonable traction. The government is not going to be happy about that at all. Fortunately, btc is a peer-to-peer network and should theoretically be hard to shut down. I doubt it's actually hard to shut down since the client gets its list of peers from the user list in an automatically and transparently joined IRC channel (if I understand correctly). Heh.

I think, however, the domain seizures just emphasize the importance of using a system that doesn't depend on regularly constituted DNS and getting more and more P2P infrastructure in place. I2P should be looked at as particularly promising.

If the Bitcoin client cannot connect to the IRC channel, it uses an in-built list of initial nodes to connect to the P2P network. Shutting down the IRC channel via a court order wouldn't shut down the Bitcoin network.

You could harvest IP addresses from the IRC channel, but you could also do that by running the client and noting down which peers you connect to. Unless you're running behind Tor or I2P, it's not hard to figure out which IP addresses have connected.

However, assuming the government had this list, what would it do? It's hard to bring charges against a large number of individuals scattered throughout different jurisdictions, and historically, the US government hasn't gone after the people using alternative currencies; they'd go after the source.

They could shut down the Bitcoin site - which would be quickly moved to an international domain. They could try and prosecute the lead programmers of the Bitcoin software, but this would not be particularly successful. It wouldn't stop Bitcoin, and I think it would be hard for them to show the currency as being illegal without, for instance, affecting MMO currencies as well.

I figure their best move would be to shut down the currency exchanges, or at least tie them up in court long enough to damage confidence in the Bitcoin economy. However, if the exchanges win, then Bitcoin has an official seal of legality, and a huge heaping of press attention.

This helps some I guess, but I don't think it'd be that hard to take out all or almost all of the hardcoded initialization nodes if they're able to get IRC taken down, too. btc really needs a more robust method to locate peers. IRC with a few hardcoded fallback nodes is not very decentralized imo.

Hardcoded nodes are only needed if that's your first start. After that bitcoin client collects a databases of nodes, listening to "addr" messages from the network. On the next restarts, it uses addresses from that database one by one.

And there are about 300 hardcoded nodes right now from different countries.

I see. That's better I suppose. You just need a relatively easy way to update the seed nodes in case all of the included nodes are down. Does this exist? If not, maybe I'll add it to the client.

There is a dns-seeding (currently two domains which respond with multiple A records, pointing to known good nodes).

I think hardcoded nodes are updated only manually via git.

I don't think, that prosecuting of programmers will be unsuccessful. I won't be surprised, if Gavin's programming will be described as yet another "unique form of domestic terrorism".

Probably original bitcoin author remained anonymous for the fear of government's retaliation.

I meant unsuccessful from the point of view of shutting down Bitcoins. However, I suspect that they'd find it difficult to charge Gavin. The Bitcoin system doesn't use physical coins, so they won't run afoul of the same law that shut down Libery Dollars. There also isn't a lot of difference between Bitcoins and in-game virtual currencies like ISK, or WoW gold. You'd also have rights organisations like the EFF lining up to defend Gavin.

Are you intentionally hyperbolizing, or do you honestly believe that the government will shut down MMORPGs? Further, I'd like to see some arguments to back up your assertion about Bitcoin. I disagree with domain seizures, but gambling sites do seem to be in violation of federal law, while Bitcoin seems to be in the clear, as it is simply a virtual good.

I believe there is an inevitable collision between the government's desire to control, regulate, and tax commerce, and virtual economies. It is hardly a secret that MMORPG items and characters are often bought and sold using real world currency. Players in Magic Online spend real world currency to acquire digital cards, which can then be exchanged for paper cards, and many brick and mortar game stores use this as the source for cards they sell. In theory players could easily use games such as these for money laundering and tax evasion. I don't think the government will shut down MMORPGs, but I believe that government interference and regulation of game economies is inevitable as they grow.

As for Bitcoin, you can research the legal history of various "digital currencies" and you will see that there have already been problems in this area. The purpose of Bitcoin, a decentralized and unregulated anonymous medium of exchange is obviously contradictory to the government's aims. It all boils down to the fact that governments want a monopoly on currencies and want to be able to monitor and tax economic activity. Digital economies are growing rapidly in size and social importance and they are no more likely to be allowed to flourish unregulated than the free sharing of copyrighted media was.

In South Korea under-19s can't sign up for an MMORPG without their parents consent. There was also talk about imposing time limits and shutting down MMO servers during school hours but I haven't heard since I left whether this went into effect.

http://kotaku.com/#!5515459/south-korea-to-impose-overnight-...

I had the opportunity to see Pastor Niemoller's cell once. Out back, behind the building, they had the execution wall.

Your reference to Bitcoin is apt, as the government siezed $7M in gold, silver and platinum from a political organization who was advocating the use of generic silver and gold rounds instead of depreciating paper currency.... and just a few weeks ago succeeded in railroading the leader of that organization.

links please?