North American Network Operators Group
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RE: Blocking specific sites within certain countries.

  • From: hostmaster
  • Date: Thu Nov 14 18:50:02 2002
At 05:28 PM 11/14/2002, Patrick W. Gilmore most definitely admitted:
-- On Thursday, November 14, 2002 8:52 PM +0100
-- hostmaster <[email protected]> supposedly wrote:
This all strikes me as incorrect. The function of the domain name system
is primarily to translate an IP number into a domain name, vice versa. If
a user wishes to browse to <http://64.236.16.20>  he/she will arrive also
at <www.cnn.com>. The domain name is propagated and subsequently
refreshed throughout the World. A browser request and reply may take each
time hundreds of different routes through the Internet from end-to-end.
If Spain would want to deploy blocking of the domain CNN.com (or in fact
any other domain) it would have to factually block individual IP's at the
telco 'in and out of Spain routes' to accomplish that.  This, by the way
is currently e.g. done in the Peoples Republic of China, be it not really
successful :)  It is also so easy to set up secondary dns's anywhere else
on the globe with a ptr to some other IP no., that a dns block sec would
never be a successful action. Blocking a /24 in Spain may be effective,
but if the Spanish site would be hosted elsewhere, or would have a mirror
hosted elsewhere, the elsewhere legislation would be the regulations the
telco's are confronted with, and looking at.

Suppose they just make it a law that each ISP has to block "domain.com" in their caching name servers?
Who is 'they', Patrick ? Suppose Spain introduces that law. Fine, but that doesn't mean that other countries have to (or will ever) abide by that. Certainly in the U.S. you won't find that many who would support even the idea.
Sure, the user could telnet somewhere and find the IP address themselves, but it would stop 99.99% of the lusers out there.
Thousands of non-Spanish dns servers (not under the Spanish restriction) would have cached the propagated terror.com url from Akamai. Any Spanish user really wanting to see terror.com will get it.  To make it a more permanent experience the Spanish conquistador should install his own winooz 95 dns service (I believe it's free), and peg it to a secondary dns outside his beautiful country.

Bert Fortrie