[bestbits] Sign-on Statement - Verisign

[Niels ten Oever]

Dear friends,

The recent news that Facebook had built censorship software to enable it
to operate in China caused concern about the complicity of large tech
companies in human rights violations online, but Facebook is not the
only company engaged in this kind of work.

Verisign, one of the Internet’s largest infrastructure providers [0], is
currently building infrastructure that will help the Chinese government
crack down on freedom of expression and the right to privacy.

By making standards and building infrastructure to comply with China’s
plan to introduce the Internet Domain Name Management Rules. If adopted,
these will implement real name policies for domain name registration in
China, Verisign is contributing to an infrastructure of repression.
Verisign’s efforts at ICANN and IETF would facilitate the new rules, and
present a serious risk to internet users in China and across the world.
Verisign is doing this before the draft rules are even law in China, and
if it continues with this work, it can be expected that this
infrastructure will also be demanded by other repressive governments.

ARTICLE 19 is seriously concerned about these efforts, and we have
drafted the attached statement and recommendations in an effort to
pressure Verisign to uphold their human rights responsibilities in
accordance with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

We hope that you will join us in this effort by adding your support to
this statement.

We plan to publish the joint statement on Thursday November 1st, so
please contact Emma (cc) if your organisation would like to sign on as
soon as possible, but by Wednesday 30th 23:59 at the latest.

Thanks in advance, and looking forward to seeing many of you at IGF.

Best wishes,

Niels

PS If you want to sign on, we will send you a final copy with all
sign-ons for republishing on your website.

PS2 We'll also keep the statement open for sign-on after publishing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign


-- 
Niels ten Oever
Head of Digital

Article 19
www.article19.org

PGP fingerprint    8D9F C567 BEE4 A431 56C4
                   678B 08B5 A0F2 636D 68E9



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