[At-Large] ICANN Board Approves Censorship Policy for DomainNames Based on Morality: 2 Board Members Speak Against It]

Sat Jul 5 03:07:12 EDT 2008

John and all,

  I and our members agree fully with your last paragraph of
your argument entirely.  It is essentially a significant part of
our core concerns for the past 9+ years.   ICANN hasn't
shown that it can manage much of anything very well to date
including it's own Domain Names, IP addresses, root servers,
or web site and mailing lists.  Yet the ICANN leadership for
the past 9+ years has been more interested in trying to make
judgment calls of the social type and translating those to how
the DNS and IP numbering system is managed.  Such has
failed on most counts far too frequently based on someone's
notion of "Political correctness" as though such applied to
everyone on the face of the planet.  Not only is such a fools
errand, it is politically not tenable.  The "Church" of ICANN,
as it were is a small and divided congregation indeed...

  The more ICANN pushes, the stronger the push back becomes...

  Internationalizing ICANN or nationalizing the DNS in terms of
gTLD's or especially IDN gTLD's will have limited success I predict.

  Lets take the first, Internationalizing ICANN.  Such a nebulous notion
will never meet the full desires, needs, and demands of a ever changing
marketplace in a market based global economic marketplace as the winds
of political power change, sometimes very slowly, but always changing.
International NGO's and corporations need, and will demand via one
method or another what they want or feel they need, and squash to the
extent possible the nationalized space holders into oblivion.  This in
some ways explains why .Coop has been a dismal failure as has
.Travel.  Yet, .mobi all be it's slow growth, is far more flexible and
as such has met with success to the extent associated with it's growth.

  The second, nationalizing the DNS to the extent IDN's can accomplish
such, also has limited but perhaps useful and interesting value to indigenous
peoples of those nations so interested in such a IDN gTLD name space.
But such is a child of language differences and unwillingness to recognize
an already well established international language, english by some nations
populace and even those in english speaking nations such as the US.  Being
multilingual as a entragal part of a DN web site is very useful for some that
want or seek international reach and exposure, for others, not so.  IDN
gTLD's in as much as Censorship on moral grounds can or will be imposed
by other nations will cause confusion amongst users for years to come, if not
decades and seek to divide not unite peoples of different nations.  Such
is not a healthy thing but may be mitigated IF the GNSO can determine a
formula to filter in or out such IDN gTLD's without offending those
nations partioners and their representative polulace/users.  A judgment call
that I personally don't believe ICANN or the GNSO collectively or
individually possesses, and never has.

John Levine wrote:

> > ... On the same scale 1 to 100, what would be the importance of a TLD
> > for communities who would ask for its use, in the case of, say,
> > ".kill-all-[add your favourite minority]", ".[add your favourite
> > insult][append your favourite trademark]", or any other subject that
> > might have controversial "morality" or "public order" implications?
> > IMHO, much higher than 97.
>
> Actually, TLDs stopped being important about the time ICANN started.
> Back when I wrote the first few editions of Internet for Dummies in the
> 1990s, once we got past the mechanics of getting online, most of the rest
> of the book was about how to find stuff, Gopher, Archie, Veronica, WAIS,
> with only one chapter on this newfangled WWW thing.  At the time, it
> seemed reasonable to hope that the DNS would grow into a directory, along
> the lines of what .MUSEUM has tried to do.
>
> I expected WAIS, a full text search system, to be the next big thing,
> since like nearly everyone else I didn't anticipate the way the web would
> absorb everything else.  But in a sense I was right, because the killer
> app for the web was and is search engines. These days I know a lot of
> people whose home page is Google, and who have no idea what the difference
> is between the Google search box and the browser address box.  Domains and
> even URLs don't matter.  They type some words into one of the boxes, and
> if they get to a place they like, they bookmark it.
>
> This means that for small language communities, while it's important that
> their writing system is included in Unicode, and that there be display
> fonts and input methods available for browsers and MUAs, the domains don't
> matter because nobody's going to type a domain more than once.  After
> that, the sites are going to be bookmarked and the e-mail addresses will
> be in the address books.
>
> At this point, the only reasonable argument I can see for a new TLD is
> branding, and there only in areas where brand vs not-brand is interesting.
> Among the reasons that .coop and .aero are flops is that nobody cares
> about real vs fake co-ops or real vs fake whatever it is you have to be to
> get into .aero these days.  It looks like .mobi will work because .mobi
> sites work on phones with tiny screens, mobile users care about that, and
> .mobi has a compliance process to check that the sites work like they're
> supposed to.  Something like .bank might be useful to help distinguish
> actual banks from phishes.  Other than that, the main motivation for new
> TLDs seems to be wishful thinking combined with faith-based budgeting.
>
> > And I might sound very old-fashioned and illiberal, but my personal opinion
> > is that we have more than enough hate speech given the current state of
> > affairs, that I don't see the need to create more ways to convey it.
>
> I don't think anyone disagrees with you.  Personally, I think that the
> $100K application cost will be a far greater bar to hate domains than any
> sort of morality screen that ICANN sets up.  The reason I'm opposed to the
> morality screen is that, based on ICANN's history, it won't work.
> Instead, it will be perverted for the benefit of the usual lobbyists.  I
> expect the trademark lawyers to object to every new TLD on every possible
> basis, technical, moral, community, and anything else on the list.  Why
> wouldn't they?  What do they have to lose?  As far as they're concerned,
> every new TLD is just another shakedown of their clients who'll have to
> waste money on defensive registrations.  And beyond that, I don't see a
> clear explanation of what the morality screen is supposed to accomplish.
> Is it supposed to bar all nasty words?  Nasty words used in nasty ways?
> How would they handle my example of .NAZI if it's a group of Holocaust
> museums who want historical and educational sites?  ICANN can barely
> handle the mechanical bits, and I see no hope of them successfully
> managing any serious judgement calls.
>
> R's,
> John
>
> PS: FYI, the message to which you were responding was from Canada, where
> the speech laws are more like European ones than US ones.  Not everyone in
> North America grew up with the 1st amendment.
>
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