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

[Vittorio Bertola]

David Allen ha scritto:
> At 1:04 AM +0200 4/4/07, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> To what extent is this reflective of the real politics that drove 
> votes for the decision?

For what I know (I'm not in each Director's mind), not at all - as I 
said, this is a not-to-the-point response to the not-to-the-point 
argument that .xxx should have been approved even if being "a stupid 
idea", just to create one more TLD. In realpolitik terms, you could only 
pick between a lot of bad consequences if you approved, and a lot of bad 
consequences if you rejected, so that wouldn't have been a useful 
approach anyway.

In the end, the premises of the approved resolution reflect directly the 
discussion and the arguments of those who approved it.

On another of your questions:

> To take this discussion on .xxx slightly into another area, who was
> to determine what is acceptable to register in .xxx? I've not read
> the proposal, so it's probably outlined there. But if it's ONLY to be
> pornography and related, under whose standards? America's? China's?
> Saudia Arabia's?

That was another problem: the last contract proposal seemed to give 
ICANN a role on internal policy rules for the TLD, which was not just 
contrary to the spirit of the RFP and of the "sponsored domain" idea, 
but also unacceptable as a direction, exactly because it would have 
involved ICANN directly in content regulation. See for example 
http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/xxx/appendix-S-rev-16feb07.pdf
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------
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