[governance] ICANN Board Vote Signals Era of Censorship in Domain Names

[Karl Auerbach]

David Goldstein wrote:

> First, one prerequisite is for applicants for a TLD to have community
> support. There was no community support from the adult/porn industry.
> ICM claimed there was but never showed it.

I don't want to debate whether there was support or not.  I tend to 
agree with Peter Dengate Thrush's assessment.

However, the real question is why should a governance body have even the 
authority to ask such a question?

We could discuss the ultimate power and authority of governments, but 
that is not what is happening here.

Rather we have a body, a body that is supposedly of limited authority 
and supposedly with some linkage to matters of a technical nature, 
making decisions about whether a person who believes he/she has a good 
idea, is willing to abide by widely accepted written internet technical 
standards and practices, and is willing to risk his/her own money can 
have a top level domain, and who is even more overtly willing than 
Yahoo, e-Bay, or Google to abide by the local laws of nations.

Intentionally making a pun on DNS itself: Where is the source of 
authority that allows an internet governance body to deny someone the 
ability to try out an idea?

One standard answer to that is "consent of the governed."  OK, I'll 
accept that.  But in this case where is that consent to be found? 
(Remember, ICANN erased the board seats of those of us who were elected 
by the public.)

One of the problems that I have seen in the context of internet 
governance is a shortage of guiding principles.

At the risk of repeating what I have said many times elsewhere: here is 
a formulation that I find useful when trying to get my bearings in these 
situations:

   First Law of the Internet

+ Every person shall be free to use the Internet
   in any way that is privately beneficial without
   being publicly detrimental.

    - The burden of demonstrating public detriment
      shall be on those who wish to prevent the
      private use.

        - Such a demonstration shall require clear
          and convincing evidence of public detriment.

    - The public detriment must be of such degree and
      extent as to justify the suppression of the
      private activity.

> Second, I have major reservations about the role ICANN may be forced
> to play in content regulation should problems eventuate with ICM.

I have heard this said, but I am quite unable to fathom what risks ICANN 
may be undertaking that are not already present via ICANN's existing 
role over .com, where the majority of porn is to be found today, and 
ICANN's role over IP addresses, which are necessarily used by every 
pornmeister.

ICANN is merely keeping track of character strings in a very simple 
database.  There are no photographs, no videos, nothing of a salacious 
nature.

Moreover, imagine that ICANN is asked to approve religious TLDs, such as 
.islam, .christian, .jew, etc.  Now, I have seen an lot of religious art 
and read a lot of biblical texts and I can attest that a lot of it is 
based on torture and violent death that many might find offensive or 
worse.  And certainly, over the years a lot more people have been killed 
as the result of religious fervor than sexual arousal.

The argument that you are making seems equally applicable to these 
religious TLDs.

If we accept the arguments made against .xxx, then it may well be that 
we ought to use those same arguments to ban religious TLDs, or cultural 
TLDs (.liberal or .green) or even those that merely elicit odd feelings 
- like .puppyfumping (that's a word I made up that sounds like something 
terrible but really has no meaning at all.)

Moreover, ICANN damned itself in this matter years ago when it first 
chose to categorize, and favor, "sponsored" TLDs.  That put ICANN into 
the content regulation business - co-ops and museums are favored 
material, titillating pictures are not.  The net result is that ICANN 
has to draw arbitrary and subjective lines.

Better to stay away from that question in the first place.  Had ICANN 
never inquired it would have never known, and need not know, whether 
.xxx represents porn or three crosses being dragged up Calvary Mount 
(indeed the triple x is in fact derived from the image of three crosses.)

And that is the issue of governance - How do we create institutions of 
governance that do the things we want to have done and yet limit them so 
that they do not overreach and do things impinge on the rights of 
natural persons?

Do we want a body that assures that the upper tiers of the domain name 
system operate reliably, fairly, efficiently, and accurately?  Or do we 
want a maiden aunt to tell adults what they can look at and not?

> In addition, the creation of such a TLD should never have got off the
> ground.

The same argument can be made about .pro, .mobi, .travel .aero, .biz, 
etc etc - None of these have garnered the attention of more than a tiny 
community and none can really demonstrate that the public has gained 
anything from their existence.

Several years ago I heard this new idea, it was an idea that was being 
rebuffed by virtually the entire community who had knowledge of such 
matters.  It was called "packet switching".

Had we followed a path that said that no idea could be deployed until it 
had proved itself valuable, then it is doubtful that we would have had 
the internet, much less this discussion.

> To call this censorship is plain wrong.

Then I guess you'd have to say that I am extremely wrong.

		--karl--
		Karl Auerbach

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