[governance] ICANN stumbling on a hornet nest

[Karl Auerbach]

When I was on the ICANN board of directors some well intended person
called me up and said that he wanted to apply to ICANN for a top level
domain, something like .christian.

Of course he, like anyone else, should be free to use the internet,
including the domain name system, in ways that are privately beneficial
as long as they don't cause public harm.

Detouring in the story a bit ... Several years back John Romkey and I
proposed an April 1 RFC for a Zen MIB (Management Information Base).  It
would contain zero management variables.  Jon Postel responded by
telling us that we should contemplate the matter for another year.

Back to .christian ... Having learned from Jon my response to this
person was that he ought to consider the difficulties he would encounter
on the road he was considering.  Did he really want to be in the
position of determining who is and who is not appropriate for
.christian?  I reminded him that many wars had been fought over things
similar to that.

In terms of ICANN's new TLD program ... ICANN is, to use what is perhaps
an idiom, between a rock and a hard place.

ICANN could block words - but an argument can be made that just about
any word has troublesome aspects.  ICANN would then have to make
policies about the degree of troublesomeness and that would strike many
of us as verging on censorship.  (Indeed ICANN has already engaged in
this kind of thing via its pro-trademark policies and that has already
extensively shaped DNS as a world of haves and have-nots.)

Or ICANN could turn a blind eye to the strings and simply administer
add/delete requests to the root zone.  But that would allow some people
to "own" some words.  And people would grumble about .christian or
.islam or .church or .nike or ...

Personally I prefer the latter course because it allows the interplay of
forces, many yet invisible, rather than the creation of a catholic
(small 'c', pun intended) overlord of names.

Someone who acquires .islam or .jew will be acquiring trouble.  We will
see money enter the temple as people who buy these kinds of names
offload these difficult assets.

	--karl--


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