[governance] RE: Human rights and new gTLDs

[McTim]

People,

I think we have had this conversation, but now we are discussing it
from a different perspective.  I agree with Vittorio, but for
different reasons than he has given.

Selective comments inline:

On 9/26/07, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:
>
> >The basis of living together in a globally diverse
> >world is to respect each other.
>
> Yes, indeed, and tolerance of diversity is the surest test of this kind
> of respect. The right to filter or block access should be devolved to
> the user level.

and it is.  I can filter out all emails from <mueller at syr.edu>, I can
write a rule into my firewall to block all my users from seeing
http://internetgovernance.org (but what would be the fun in that?)

>
> The basic conceptual mistake you have made is to confer upon TLD
> creation some kind of massive global public endorsement. The idea that
> there is something "special" about creating a TLD is a
> politico-technical myth. The administration of the TLD space is just a
> technical coordination function, no different in principle from the
> coordination of second level domains.
>

The basic conceptual mistake you have made is to forget that the DNS
is a hierarchical, distributed system (RFCs 799, 1034, 1035, 920,
1032, etc, etc).

Now, if you want to put 2 million names in the root zone (instead of
say for example .com), well you CAN do that, but IMHO you SHOULD NOT.
If you do that, you CAN still have hierarchy (info.abortion), but in
reality the DNS architecture will be flat (ter) and not hierarchical
as intended in it's original architecture.   If you'd like to change
the architecture of the DNS, I suggest that IETF lists are the place
to do that, and not the IGF.

In addition, the registry that has .abortion will be much more likely
to censor 2nd level domains than a gTLD like .info.  For example, I
can see that if the Family Values Coalition runs the registry for
.abortion, they might not be keen to allow IPPF to register
"livesaresavedby.abortion". Conversely, I can see that they would be
more keen to allow "stopall.abortion".   Karl (next mail) or ICANN can
write all the rules they want about registry actions, but I can still
see lots (more) skullduggery of the above type possible in the
namespace with a flat DNS.

> >I know that this might in some cases tend to
> >self-censorship,
>
> Thanks for the honesty. But in your formulation, it does not "tend to"
> self-censorship, it is a full-fledged philosophy of self-censorship.
>
> >are just talking about not slapping certain
> >issues in the face of some stakeholders through
> >a highly provocative global political action).
>
> I would invite you and others to examine the logical relationship
> between the statement above and the statement below:
>
> >you need to get the www.info.abortion URL to speak
> >about abortion, and that your freedom of expression
> >would be seriously harmed if you had to resort to
> >publishing the same speech at www.abortion.info instead.
>
> In the latter paragraph, you are arguing that there is no difference in
> the two identifier formulations and that the issue is trivial. In the
> earlier paragraph, you are saying that the mere existence of the TLD
> "slaps people in the face" and is "highly provocative." Which argument
> are you making, my friend?
>

It's clear to me that he is saying that your freedom of experssion would NOT be
harmed if you had to publish content at  www.abortion.info instead of
at www.info.abortion.

I agree with him.

-- 
Cheers,

McTim
$ whois -h whois.afrinic.net mctim
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