I’ve been migrating my domains from Network Solutions to Cloudflare. It got me thinking about how domain registration and DNS seem beyond the usual self-hosting solutions.
What if a human rights organization was concerned that an oppressive government would strong arm their registrar or DNS provider to block access to their domain-base digital resources?
Yes, they could become their own registrar if they could pay a big annual accreditation fee to ICANN and self-host the technical and operational requirements.
Yes, they could run their own DNS server and issue their own SSL certificates.
The counterintuitive aspect is that these work against some aspects of digital sovereignty. The hypothetical human rights organization that wants to shield itself from censorship may find more protection by using a big registrar and DNS provider.
Government censors consider big players “too important to block.” Encryption keeps censored content indistinguishable from other traffic on the same service. Censors are forced to either allow access or take down the whole service.
TIL this strategy/phenomenon is known as “Collateral freedom”
The sources on the Wikipedia article are really interesting.
My choice to migrate from NetSol to Cloudflare was based on price and my distaste for NetSol’s upsell-heavy UX, not based on a concern that I might be a target for censorship. But I am also encouraged to know that Cloudflare has stood up to requests from Italian government censors, and is fighting huge potential fines for its stand. (For now?)
This looks interesting: