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

[Vittorio Bertola]

Milton Mueller ha scritto:
> You can come up with all kinds of after-the-fact rationalizations, as
> Vittorio does, but there is only one thing that has changed between June
> 2005 (when the ICANN Board voted to approve the application) and last
> week (when they voted to kill it) and that is the strong and sustained
> objections of governments, opponents of pornography and adult
> webmasters.

Actually, the most significant change in these years was that a relevant 
part of the adult entertainment world, which initially supported the 
proposal, changed their mind and started to actively oppose it. Vint 
Cerf's vote, for example, was mostly due to this, as he said in his 
declaration. And he was one of those who initially voted in favour of 
negotiating an agreement.

In any case, why do you think that opposition by governments should be 
disregarded? They are a significant stakeholder and their opinion has to 
be taken into account. Actually, one of ICANN's core values (see the 
Bylaws) is:

"11. While remaining rooted in the private sector, recognizing that 
governments and public authorities are responsible for public policy and 
duly taking into account governments' or public authorities' 
recommendations."

 > .xxx was killed because it was controversial and ICANN
> lacked the spine to stand up to that kind of pressure. full stop.

It seems to me that you are trying to read the minds of Board members... 
and not even correctly :-) Actually, you need more "spine" to stand up 
to the multimillion dollar lawsuits that ICM is likely to bring.

> Let me dispose of the absurd notion that the semantics of a domain name
> doesn't affect the ability to express oneself freely online. This
> argument has been decisively rejected by a court in the US.

Oh well, if a court in the US (one of the zillion courts in the US) says 
so, then it's settled for the globe... :-)

> And it's intuitively obvious why this argument is silly. Imagine someone
> saying, "you cannot name your book "The Middle East: Peace or Aparthed"
> because that will offend the Israelis, but you can say whatever you like
> inside the book." Is that free expression?

Top level domains are not the expression of an individual, they are 
broad group names that are to be used by thousands or millions of 
individuals together. You simply can't pretend to have exactly your own 
favourite string as TLD - even if we had one million of them, there 
wouldn't be enough to grant one to every user.

Still, while I see how your free expression is harmed by not being able 
to set up a website at the URL <trademark>sucks.com, I can't see how 
your free expression is harmed by setting up your pro-abortion website 
at proabortion.com rather than at pro.abortion. It is perhaps more 
harmed by the fact that if no new gTLDs are introduced then it'll be 
hard to find proabortion.<anything> still available.

Incidentally, even if this wasn't a factor in the decision, I think 
that, if ICANN had approved .xxx, one minute later there would have been 
many governments suggesting to freeze the introduction of new gTLDs 
until ICANN started to be more considerate in choices. In realpolitik 
terms, it would have been a disaster.
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------
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