Had Nothing to Do with Torrent Domain Seizures — Um, ICANN

You can blame ICANN, but not for this one.

I was just looking at ICANN’s page for next week’s meeting in Colombia and noticed they show a twitter feed picking up comments on ICANN. Today it’s flooded with this tweet:

@brokep: Hello all #isp of the world. We’re going to add a fresh competing root-server since we’re tired of #ICANN. Please contact me to help.

This discussion stems from the U.S. government seizure of a number of domain names the prior week that were allegedly used for infringement.

OK folks, let’s get this straight: ICANN didn’t have anything to do with seizing the domain names the prior week. Frankly no one familiar with ICANN would even think that it had something to do with this. It’s outside of what they do. But Kevin Murphy asked them anyway just to be sure.

The idea of creating an alternate root has been suggested multiple times. And fear of U.S. government interference will certainly stoke that.

But this time (and this time only) you can’t blame ICANN.