The recent events in Egypt that led to Egyptian websites becoming unavailable to the world at large have seen the ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom to suggest "that a policy to encourage the establishment of secondary servers to promote continuity of service as well as DNS stability could be useful and in the global public interest."

Writing on the ICANN Blog, Beckstrom says that "ICANN will ask the ccNSO to consider proposing a policy to address this type of situation."

This proposal follows most internet connectivity to Egypt being shut down on 27 January, "apparently on the instruction of the national government. This has led to the inaccessibility of the main domain name system (DNS) server of the Egyptian ccTLD (.eg)."

"The primary servers they operate have been inaccessible to those outside of Egypt since January 27. Secondary DNS servers for .eg, located in Austria and the United States, have continued to function with data provided before the shutdown.

"The .مصر DNS servers are exclusively in Egypt and there do not appear to be any secondary DNS servers outside the country. This means that service to sites served by this top-level domain are unreachable by the rest of the world."