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

[Vittorio Bertola]

Robin Gross ha scritto:
> 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.

May I challenge the frequent use of "subjective" as a pejorative 
adjective? Policy decisions in a global and very diverse environment 
necessarily reflect differences in mindsets and evaluations, and thus 
differ according to the person; they can't be anything but subjective. 
The legitimacy lies in the composition of the Board and in the processes 
that lead to it, not in the decision itself.

Apart from this, my comment on the "bad idea" was secondary to the fact 
that .xxx was rejected because, in all honesty, most directors thought 
that it did not meet the requirements for approval set forth in the 
process. People can legitimately disagree, as long as they recognize the 
legitimacy of those who disagree with them :-)

> 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.

Curiously, at the GAC Open Session the summarization of the general 
sentiment of participants was "be warned that if you approve .xxx, then 
you are stepping into content regulation". The exact opposite of what 
you say here.

Personally, I can't see why rejecting .xxx is speech regulation, but 
approving it is technical coordination. If the creation of .xxx is a 
political issue, then it is so both if you approve it and if you reject 
it. I think that it is utopian to think that you can discuss such an 
action without considering the social and political aspects; that's what 
most of the outside world expects anyway.

And the suggestion that ICANN should do stupid things just because the 
process leads to them is, as a minimum, bureaucratical :-)

> 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.

But ICANN did not decide on this application based on content. Instead, 
it decided on a set of criteria which included a qualitative and, to the 
scarce extent possible, quantitative evaluation of support and 
opposition to this proposal. It is indeed true that many of those who 
expressed opposition might have done so on the basis of the expected 
content of this TLD, but then, you should complain with them and not 
with ICANN.

I tend to feel that, independently of what you and I may think of this 
matter, the Internet (the global community) in the overall wasn't mature 
enough for .xxx. Perhaps you, Milton, Susan etc would get better results 
by convincing the world to embrace your "hyper-liberalistic" view of 
this market, though I don't think that it'd be easy to get significant 
support for that political orientation outside of a few developed countries.
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------
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