FACTS OF THE CASE
Chanel has brought suite against hundreds of Internet domain name owners, accusing them of using the website domains that they own to traffic in counterfeit goods. A district court judge in Nevada has ruled that Chanel can legally seize the domain names in question, and force a company critical to Internet routing protocols to make the results resolve to a site where the case documentation is displayed. Furthermore, the judge ruled that Google, Bing, Yahoo, Google+, Twitter, and Facebook must de-index the websites from their search results!
Obviously many observers are quite concerned about the potential implications of allowing corporate interests to fundamentally interfere in such critical Internet services. Furthermore, the ruling pays no heed to the fact that the Internet is a world-wide network, much of which is hosted in regions of the world not bound by US copyright and trademark law. It is unclear how the demands of the ruling can be enforceable in this context, but nevertheless sites registered to US registrars have been made inaccessible, even if they are hosted overseas.
PUBLIC POLICY AND TECHNOLOGY
The legal implications are interesting on their own, but this case also provides further motivation for Internet protocols that are design with public policy in mind. The technical specifications of existing protocols and search engines happen to be susceptible to interference of this sort from third-parties, whether it be for the common good or crass commercial interests. We discuss the issues raised by the design of the DNS protocol and search engines, as well as how different technical approaches could achieve different policy outcomes.
DNS: WHAT IT IS
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical, distributed naming system for computers or services connected to the Internet, often described metaphorically as a phonebook for translating the human-readable domain names (e.g. “chanel-warez.com”) into IP addresses used by internet routing protocols (e.g. “74.125.224.146”).
For the purpose of this discussion, the most important fact about DNS is that responsibility for creating the mapping between domain names and addresses is delegated to internationally-accredited domain name registrars. These domain name registrars (which are often commercial entities) control registries that are responsible for maintaining the database of names registered within the domains that it administers. By adjusting the information stored in registries, a registrar can control to which IP address a particular name resolves, and thus the content that an end-user sees when they enter a particular domain name into their browser.
DNS AS A STANDARDS-BASED CHOKEPOINT
The problem with DNS and the registrar model is that while the registries themselves constitute a distributed database, the root servers run by each registrar effectively serve as a sort of “choke-point” (“a limited number of points through which data must flow” as defined by Morris and Davidson) in that information provided by the registrar is cached by all subordinate registries. This allows for third-parties, the US judicial system in this case, to effectively exercise control over the content available to internet users by coercing particular registrars or registry maintainers.
DNS was designed in the early 1980s, at a time when commercial uses of the internet were non-existent. Commercial registrars and registry operators did not exist until the late 1990s.The creation of DNS and its companion protocol exemplifies the the public-policy-oblivious approach decried by Morris and Davidson. While international organizations in charge of accrediting and managing registrars already exist, it is unclear what power they have in the face of legal action taken to manipulate registrar behavior in individual countries.
SEARCH ENGINES AND SOCIAL MEDIA AS DE FACTO CHOKEPOINTS
Any user of the Internet will immediately recognize the fact that, for the most part, a website that is not indexed by major search engines might as well not exist. Because they are a single, centralized entity used by virtually all internet users to locate content, search engines have become de facto choke-points, in that they are a single point of access that can be coerced into limiting end-user access to data. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are more recent examples of the same phenomenon, as they are increasingly the channels through which users locate or are referred to websites. Although proposed laws like SOPA explicitly provide the power to ‘de-index’ content on the internet, this case provides precedent for doing so without the need for legislative approval.
POSSIBLE TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS
Fortunately, there are other protocols that avoid the choke-points presented by the centralized root servers in the DNS specification, or the centralized servers used by search engines or social networks. One example, Gnutella, uses technology similar to a distributed hash-table to provide resilient decentralized search. Using this protocol, an end-user needs only the IP address of single member of a given network to discover other nodes and thus access content stored in the network. Additionally, the protocol automatically replicates data on multiple machines making it resilient to node failures caused both by hardware failures or judicial intervention. Adopting truly distributed protocols for domain name resolution or content-based search would be a technical solution that would have the policy outcome of making such unilateral censorship more difficult.
Case citation: Chanel, Inc. v. Does, et al., 11-cv-01508-KJD-PAL (D. Nev.)