Has dictator “privatized” .by domain zone?

By one decree Lukashenka has made so many problems and inconsistencies in ByNet, that the mess is to be cleaned up for many years.

The Belarusian ruler has encharged everyone with tasks and responsibilities: from clients of an internet café to webmasters of state websites. And in an odd moment he adjusted distribution of BY domains, as long as they are “Belarusian”. Under decree number 60, the Operating and Analytical Centre under the President (OAC) “defines the order of registration of .by domain names”.

However, as website informs, in fact .by domain is not owned by the Republic of Belarus, and it does not belong to the OAC and “Open Contact”, which are just an administrator and a technical administrator of the domain zone respectively. “OC” and the OAC have been given the right of administration and setting rules of domains registration by the international non-profit organisation IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), which is in its turn is controlled by the ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). And that’s not all. The ICANN had been created with participation of the US government for regulating issues concerning Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, top-level domain name system management and other aspects of Internet functioning. No matter how many times Libya, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and other countries which are “progressive” in terms of Internet freedom, tried to change the existing situation through the UN, the Internet is still under the US government, thank goodness.

If desired, any bold spirit of the level of Yury Zisser, having gained support and expert opinions of international human rights organisations and the national internet community, can file a complaint to ICANN, and referring to violation of assumed obligations, deprive the OAC and “Open Contact” rights of administrators. And there are enough reasons for that: suspicious technical DNS failures during the presidential election in 2001, numerous denials to register domains without giving plausible reasons, buying-up of most “tempting” domains by the administrator itself. The situation is purely hypothetical, but what should be done next? According to requirements of the ICANN, any legal Belarusian organisation meeting a number of formal conditions can be a domain administrator, while the decree given such a possibility to one structure only. A contradiction is evident.