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

[William New]

Hi, just wanted to add our Monday am story by Monika Ermert to the
discussion in case it's useful. In particular, I was interested to see her
characterisation of a suggestion from Vint Cer. Thanks, William New,
Intellectual Property Watch

Rights and Content Issues May Complicate Internet Domain Name Expansion
Full story: http://ip-watch.org/weblog/wp-trackback.php?p=575

"ICANN Board Chairman Vint Cerf, who seemed relieved to get the .xxx
decision off his table after three years of debate, said he would like to
fold the different rights problems into one procedure. At a session on
internationalised domain names, Cerf proposed consideration of allowing a
common application and evaluation process for generic TLDs, non-Latin gTLDs
and non-Latin ccTLDs. "Let's figure out," Cerf said, "if there is a process
that will allow any proposal to be exposed to opposition and find a way to
resolve it, then we could actually proceed right away."

But Cerf, who is respected as one of the developers of the Internet's
underlying protocol known as TCP-IP, did not know how this would work. "It
could be that a common dispute resolution process might be sufficient to
allow us to move ahead on all fronts, as long as parties who are concerned
about any particular proposal have a way to raise those issues and have them
resolved." But this might be an idea even more difficult to realise than the
start of the TCP-IP network back then."


-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Gross [mailto:robin at ipjustice.org] 
Sent: 03 April 2007 20:06
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Vittorio Bertola
Subject: Re: [governance] ICANN Board Vote Signals Era of Censorship in
Domain Names

Hi Vittorio!

Thanks for the comments.  But asking the question whether or not .xxx is 
a 'good idea' begs for a system of subjective and arbitrary policies 
from ICANN.

You may be right .xxx is a stupid idea.  You may be right that down the 
line some govts could use a .xxx for censorship purposes.  But all of 
this is irrelevant. 

The point is that ICANN is NOT in the business of picking good ideas and 
preventing bad ideas from going forward.   ICANN's mission is technical 
coordination not speech regulation.  ICANN is in the business of 
assigning names and numbers, not picking winners and losers among 
competing ideas.

So simply asking the question whether or not a certain tld should be 
allowed to exist based on its content, means we accept content 
regulation by ICANN.

Robin


Vittorio Bertola wrote:

> 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,


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