[governance] Human rights and new gTLDs

[Vittorio Bertola]

Milton L Mueller ha scritto:
>  
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vittorio Bertola [mailto:vb at bertola.eu] 
> 
>> As one of the people who are working on this, I would 
>> like to see comments that are a bit more constructive 
> [snip]
>> It is a bit depressing to see that whenever some people 
>> try to roll up their sleeves and work on real advances 
>> for human rights, there is much more support from some 
>> governments than from fellow civil society 
>> participants.
> 
> Vittorio:
> I think it is constructive to raise and discuss these issues. I also
> have doubts about the Internet Bill of Rights proposal. My concerns are
> not about outreach, but about substance. First, I think it was Meryem
> Marzouki who at one point raised serious questions about encouraging
> governments to redefine basic human rights for the Internet, in that we
> could end up losing not gaining. Those fears, which I at first did not
> take too seriously, were reinforced by our exprience with the "Keep the
> Core Neutral" campaign. I noticed that you actively opposed efforts
> within ICANN to prevent ICANN from exercising "content control" over TLD
> strings. You advanced instead a communitarian approach that would not
> recognize any specific right to freedom of action but only a right of an
> institutionalized community around ICANN to suppress whatever
> expressions, via TLD strings, it did not like. (Let me know if I am not
> stating your position correctly, but it is recorded in the transcript of
> the puerto rico meeting).

Milton, the position you are pushing is that anyone should be free to 
get a domain such as ".abortion" (your example) or ".childpornography" 
or dot-whatever-blasphemy, and if there are countries of the world that 
are unhappy about that, they should censor these domains or break out of 
the global Internet.

I see that as shooting ourselves in the foot to prove the fact that we 
are free to shoot ourselves in the foot. The Internet has been the major 
factor in democratizing many societies around the world, before their 
non-democratic governments could realize what was happening. We live in 
a time where governments are looking for whatever excuse to start to put 
licenses, rules and controls over the Internet. Giving them a good one 
is the last thing we should be doing.

Moreover, if there is half of the world that is offended by such a 
visible reference to, say, abortion or blasphemies or whatever, I think 
that you have to respect that. The basis of living together in a 
globally diverse world is to respect each other. I know that this might 
in some cases tend to self-censorship, but you can't build a world of 
peace by ignoring other people's sensitivities (and note that we are not 
talking about censoring content, we are just talking about not slapping 
certain issues in the face of some stakeholders through a highly 
provocative global political action).

And would you find it acceptable if ICANN approved the creation of TLDs 
which incite to racism, homophoby, war, or whatever? Do you draw a line 
somewhere? How? There's not just Milton Muller's freedom of expression, 
but other human rights are involved.

Incidentally, I think that there are several other important issues that 
are affected by ICANN's new gTLD process. For example, depending on 
application fees and technical requirements, the developing world might 
be deprived of the possibility of accessing this resource, and made 
dependent on American and European companies (I spent the afternoon 
arguing about this on the ICANN Board list). Or the entire system may be 
optimized for business, thus making it difficult for NGOs to apply. 
These issues are IMHO more immediate and impacting than your claim that 
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.
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------
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