Wampum

At the New Delhi ICANN meeting I worked with someone from the .ir (Iran) DNS registry on a technical issue, the variations, in Farsi and Arabic, for strings composed of characters associated with glyph tables published by the Unicode Consortium, on the form of the glyphs of terminal characters.

If I bught a domain name from him, say for the purposes of manifesting the actual terminal character variations in the lash-up we in ICANN call "Internationalized Domain Names", I'd run a non-trivial risk of an unfriendly visit from some federal prosecutor working for George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Even if buying a domain name, like i-like-15th-century-persian-art.ir (in English/ASCII, or Farsi/IDN, or Arabic/IDN) didn't trigger the prosecute-and-destroy response from the Bush/Cheney political operatives in the DOJ, if Maine had invested in my start-up at any point in the past decade, or if my bit of Maine High Tech was publicaly traded, and some state fund had invested in shares of my technology company, then Ethan Strimling's L.D. 1934, An Act to Require the State to Divest Itself of Funds from Companies Doing Business in Iran, would hit my share price.

At the Rome ICANN meeting I had lunch with the head of the .ps (Palestine) DNS registry. I'm not even going to guess what Ethan's views on the necessity, or utility, of technical cooperation, with actual contractual obligations, are for network infrastructure operators in North America and the bits of West Asia that are targets for "sanctions".

Ethan's claim to fame, outside of the West End, where all the Steven's showcases still have two Volvos, is the "network neutrality" mantra of the Daily Kos faction of the blogosphere. For someone so invested in net clue, Ethan makes bags of hammers look more useful.