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

[Vittorio Bertola]

Robin Gross ha scritto:
> From my cyberlaw blog:
> http://ipjustice.org/wp/2007/04/02/icann_board_votexxx

Well, once in a lifetime, we disagree completely :-)

I have had the luck to witness personally the last three months of 
discussions in the ICANN Board. So, believe it or not, your 
interpretation of the reasons and the value of this vote is IMHO quite 
wrong. Let me explain.

First of all, ICANN had a process for TLD applications (which, 
incidentally, is quite a bad process, starting from the meaningless 
"sponsorship" idea, but that's what we had at the moment), and the vote 
was meant to judge whether the application meant the requirements. There 
was no discussion on whether "adult entertainment" is good or bad or 
whether it should be censored. There was, however, discussion on whether 
the criteria were met; some directors thought they were, most thought 
they weren't. That's how the vote went. Susan and another director - not 
even all the five who voted against rejection - apparently assumed that 
those who disagreed with them did so due to political pressure or desire 
for censorship. This was entirely their assumption and many of the 
others felt personally offended by it.

Even if you forget about the process and think about the idea in itself, 
it looks like a bad idea. Adult entertainment sites do not want to be 
labelled, exactly because they are afraid of being censored; many of 
them - basically all, according to some's judgement; for example, there 
was no single adult webmaster speaking in support of .xxx in the entire 
meeting - made it clear that they'd not have used the new domain. So the 
only purpose for this domain would have been defensive registrations, 
e.g. transfering money from consumers to the company who would have run 
it. Personally - and especially given that I represent consumers on the 
ICANN Board - I think that this would have been publicly detrimental.

Then, let's discuss about "censorship". I think that the statement that 
not approving .xxx is "content-related censorship" is impossible to take 
seriously. You write:

> By voting to turn down the .XXX
> application for public policy reasons, the Board indicated it will go 
> beyond its technical mission of DNS coordination and seek to decide what 
> ideas are allowed to be given a voice in the new domain name space.

Do you seriously mean that since there is no .xxx there is no porn over 
the Internet?

Actually, if .xxx had been approved, then many governments could have 
passed laws to force porn sites into it, thus actually making censorship 
easier. The only reply I got to this observation was "yes, but in the US 
we have the First Amendment that would make it impossible". And what 
about the rest of the world?

All in all, of course there are sociopolitical aspects in some of the 
decisions that ICANN has to take. Even refusing to consider these 
aspects, and embracing the hyper-liberalistic, totally free market 
approach of approving each and every application for a new TLD no matter 
how controversial it is, which you and others seem to advocate, is a 
political choice. It's way too common to hide behind memes such as "it 
should be a technical decision only" or "let the market decide", but 
these are political choices as well, with lots of implications. I am 
surprised by how so many brilliant people from the liberal US 
environment seem unable to accept diversity on this issue, to the point 
of questioning the legitimacy or good faith of decisions when they go in 
a different direction.

I'll stop here, pointing at the comment I left on Susan's blog - 
http://scrawford.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2007/3/30/2845638.html#882501 
- for further consideration about the "cultural diversity" issue.

Ciao,
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------
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