AW: [governance] RE: Human rights and new gTLDs

[Dan Krimm]

No question that net neutrality issues in the US are critical, and that the
lack of open access and/or interconnection regulation has structurally
reduced competition in the US broadband ISP market, thus precluding the
normal market incentives for net neutrality to emerge as a competitive
feature to serve customers.

Absolutely, there is no reason to trust Verizon or AT&T not to block data
on a discriminatory basis in the future.

However, this does not make the ICANN issue less important in the long run.
ICANN is threatening to claim authority over expressive characteristics of
DNS and to develop processes for adjudicating claims with regard to those
expressions.  It starts with gTLDs, but once the foot is in the door there
the precedents can easily apply more broadly.  Censorship always starts
with the least controversial specific cases, but then the task of figuring
out where to draw the line becomes infinitely complicated, and the line has
a potential to move great distances in short periods of time.

Every society has to debate how and where to draw the line, and if it is to
be a just society it must be accountable to the full range of its citizenry
when it addresses these tradeoffs (between freedom of expression as the
default and actionable offense as the limited and circumscribed
carve-out/opt-out from free expression).

The issue of net neutrality in the US is a matter ultimately of federal
legislation and regulation.  At least it is under the authority of a
political jurisdiction that has not totally lost its accountability to the
general public, though it has certainly been frighteningly eroded in the
last several years.

That sort of public jurisdiction is exactly where these sorts of issues
should be contended with.  ICANN does not constitute such a properly
accountable political jurisdiction.  But it is threatening to usurp such
political jurisdictions.

No good can come of this.  Would you trust ICANN not to block your data, if
it appealed to authoritarian governments and large IP-owning corporations
to decide what data to block or not?  I wouldn't.

Once again, this is not just about gTLDs.  It is about political authority
and legislative/administrative/judicial process -- i.e., accountability to
the general public.  ICANN is not a public government, and it cannot
effectively replace public governance.  For it to attempt to do so would be
frightening and alarming.

The new gTLD policy as currently proposed contains elements that amount to
nothing short of a Trojan Horse for the censorship lobby and others who
wish to centralize control over information.  (This is not to say that all
who support the proposed gTLD policy wish to impose censorship and
centralized control of information, but that all who wish to do these
things support the gTLD policy because it helps bring them closer to that
result.)

Dan



At 6:37 PM -0700 10/1/07, David Goldstein wrote:
>This debate on human rights and gTLDs is interesting, but surely the role
>of ICANN in this debate, that is possible censorship, is minor when one
>looks at other players. For example, Verizon and AT&T have both been
>panned in the press in the last week for censorship. Admittedly Verizon
>reversed its decision, but will AT&T? And did Verizon reverse its decision
>due to freedom of speech issues, or public pressure?
>
>Timothy Karr writing in the Huffington Post writes of both issues and digs
>out of the AT&T terms of service the following:
>AT&T may "immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your
>service ... without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes ...
>tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents,
>affiliates and subsidiaries."
>
>This is a real and happening area of censorship, yet there is no
>discussion here as to the merits of such terms of service, nor of Verizon
>censoring messages that can go across its network.
>
>Free speech advocates can huff and puff about the supposed First Amendment
>in the US, but when incidents such as these occur, it makes non-US
>citizens see it's only a freedom of speech, if others will let you...
>
>For the article in The Huffington Post, see:
>What's the Biggest Threat to Free Speech in America
>If you thought phone companies were simply supposed to get you connected,
>think again. Over the last week we learned that the nation's two largest
>telecommunications firms want to get into the business of censorship as
>well - blocking the free flow of information sent over phones and the
>Internet.
>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-karr/whats-the-biggest-threat_b_66708.html
>
>Regards
>David
>
>---------
>David Goldstein
> address: 4/3 Abbott Street
>           COOGEE NSW 2034
>           AUSTRALIA
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>
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