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

[Evan Leibovitch]

Hi Roberto,
>> ... 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.
>>     

Many of those insulting terms already exist as SLDs under .com and
perhaps elsewhere and I don see ICANN in any hurry to act on those.

I think the use of extreme examples may not be helpful. As has been
mentioned, the cost of making a new TLD provides a disincentive to most
of the fringe groups that would use TLDs  for hate.

My concern, OTOH, is the use of subjective definitions of morality and
order to stifle positive-looking orgs that are legitimate in some
societies but offensive to others. Think .gay, .falungong, .zionism,
.scientology, .etc. Personally, I would prefer the risk of having
.alqaeda (or its Arabic-script equivalent) allowed to the thought of
other TLDs limited to organizations and groups who offend absolutely nobody.

> 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. [...] 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.
>   
Hi John.

I don't think it's quite like that... yet.

The existence of typo-squatting as a profitable endeavour provides at
least some evidence that some significant component of the Internet
still uses the address bar. Sure, search systems help in many cases as a
directory (you don't even need Google's fancy algorithms for that simple
task, Yahoo and the Open Directory Project do fine at that). However,
the fact remains that .com has become the realm of squatters and
speculators (and, to a certain extent, so have .org, .biz and .info) --
some competition in this field is IMO badly needed.

> 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.
>   
See above. There is still significant enough use of the addressbar that
I can see at least reasonable demand for a large TLD space -- if for no
other reason than to avoid
ineedtomakethislargedomainbecauseallshorteronesaretaken.com

> 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. [...]
>   
> 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.
These last two comments of John's go hand in hand. ICANN doesn't need
morality clauses; it has the free market. The TLDs that will succeed
financially are -- by definition -- the ones for whom sufficient
interest exists. Perhaps a domain under .bank might cost $5K/year, which
helps pay for the policing and keeps the TLD profitable despite
relatively few subdomains.

> The reason I'm opposed to the morality screen is that, based on ICANN's history, it won't work.
My objection is based on this ... but also, in general, the entry of
ICANN into areas where it was never supposed to go. ICANN is not a
treaty organization, and the gTLD policy -- by introducing subjective
elements such as morality -- looks more like an international treaty
than a technical specification. Arguably ICANN has already been hijacked
by the IP lobby to go beyond international trademark treaty, and in the
gTLD policy ICANN follows this trend even further.

> 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.
>   
Exactly. ICANN has attempted to dodge this accusation by outsourcing the
actual judgements to third-party mercenary Solomons; but that evasion is
transparent and short-lived.

We are asked now to accept the inevitability of the morality/order
clause and work to define its parameters, knowing full well that
whatever we come up with -- even in the very unlikely situation that our
POV is accepted -- the implementation WILL be hopelessly botched. And it
will be botched to the benefit of ICANN's monied interests.

The only way to prevent the botch is to stay out of this realm.

- Evan