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Almost 2,000 years ago, the poet Juvenal posed the question, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" - "Who will watch the watchers?" Juvenal was actually riffing on Plato's "Republic" and with a good reason: The question was, and still is, profound because it concerns a basic problem with the machineries of government and governance and, by extension, applies to any authority that has little or no oversight.
In the IT world a great example of a lack of oversight of an authority is the situation that we have with Network Solutions Inc. (NSI). NSI is the domain name registrar that was allowed to have sole control over the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains up until 1999, and for which it gouged the public with the permission and support of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
In the last few days, NSI was found to be doing something completely and unequivocally unethical: Holding...