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Queer.af mastodon domain has been seized by the Taliban
(mastodon.world)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
~~We (via the ICANN, see below) actually have the power to do that. The
.af
TLD only works because the root DNS servers delegate the.af
TLD to the Afghan nameservers. As soon as we stop doing that, they are powerless.~~~~And as a bonus, the ICANN could set the nameservers to OpenNIC's, setting a precedent for a more public ownership of the Internet. But somehow I highly doubt they would ever do that...~~
Edit: I did what I documented here to do, and here is the (automated) answer from the ICANN:
Of course, the contact details at https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/af.html are the Afghan ministry contact information, so this is a no go.
And the IANA being managed by the ICANN, aside from electing to use alternative DNS servers, there isn't much we can do.
ICANN is going to become a UN agency before they kick out states as stakeholders. Their status, though, is not derived from that but by silent agreement from the ISPs handing out servers following ICANN's root servers as default, they'd have to fuck up quite badly for that institutional inertia to change, and any replacement on that level is absolutely bound to respect ccTLDs as control over their own ccTLD is a national security issue for all states, and push come to shove they'd legislate that domestic ISPs have to hand out servers that respect at least their own ccTLD.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Plenty of letter combinations to choose from especially now that there's vanity domains. If this was the early 2000s e.g. lemmy.world would simply be lemmy.net.
You seem to be absolutely right. The conduct of the Afghan registry goes square against the ICANN base registry agreement, yet they won't do squat against ccTLDs, as evidenced per the email I received (see my edit).
Thank you for your comment.