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

[Wolfgang Kleinwächter]

Lee:

What is still lacking is an 'Administrative Procedures Act' for the Internet, in partidular to guide ICANN on how it should go about and what it may or may not consider in its decisionmaking, whether for gtld's or anything else. 

Wolfgang:
Lee, this is a good point. But who should adopt such an Act and who should guide ICANN? The DOC? The GAC? A new governmental or non-governmental body? One idea - in the long run -. could by the formation of a new hybrid organisation composed by all stakeholders with a mandat to deal with public issues and a certain authority (which could come from an intergovernmental arrangement eventually within the framework of GAC)? 
 
The chain fo controversial cases will grow dramaticially in the future. If you take only GEO-TLDs, which are labeld in the GNSO report as one group of TLDs  where we have "concerns", you will have soon an open pandora box. Projects so far which are on the horzon are .berlin, .nyc, .cym (Wales), .sco, .btn (Bretagne), .london. What about .basque, .tibet, . tchechnia, .kosovo?  
 
A good case is Germany and the .berlin proposal. The local government in Berlin (which is a land according to the German constitution) manages berlin.de in cooperation with a private company. It is naturally against the proposal arguing this would lead to "consumer confusion" (protecting their own business under berlin.de) . Paternalistic? Consumers are stupid and need guidance from the top? The funny thing is that the German Bundestag with the votes of the two main parties has adopted a TLD resolution which calls on ICANN to open the door for Geo-TLDs like .münchen, köln, .bayern etc to give consumers more chocse and to stimulate competition. 
 
Who is right? Is it consumer confusion or is it consumer choice? ALAC is planning to organize a workshop on that issue in San Juan to figure out the arguments of pro and con. But the more interesting issues is who decides on .berlin? If ICANN follows the .xxx procedure it will ask the GAC. GAC members will ask the German government but the German government has an internal problem to harmonize different approaches on the federal and the local level. If it is seen as a "cultural affair", then according to the German constiution, the federal government has no competences. Does it mean, that for such a decision ICANN has to consult with the local authorities directly? And how other governments will see this? Some may be happy to have next to the ccTLD also some big (or small) cities with a TLD for local marketing, tourism, local economy promotion, local language support (like .cat) etc. Others will fear that this will become very counterproductive, undermining national monopolies etc.
 
Where to go? And who leads the process? And which body is entitled to make a final decision? A lut of fun is waiting down the TLD road ....
 
Wolfgang
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