The public overwhelmingly opposes plans by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN) to censor generic top-level domains (gTLDs) on the grounds of moral, political and commercial judgments and other non-technical criteria, according to comments received on its new policy guidelines.
Most of the people commenting believe that ICANN should confine itself to technical and operational matters and that the corporation should stop trying to control the content of the Internet.
For many years, ICANN only used seven TLDs (.com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, and .org), but this was expanded to 14 in 2001 with the addition of three unsponsored (.biz, .info, .name, and .pro) and three sponsored (.aero, .coop, and .museum) top-level domains.
Now ICANN plans to add more TLDs on an annual basis, and the approval process has run into some controversy as policy makers want to censor domain names deemed inappropriate, such as .xxx for pornographic sites.
The public commenting period for the new policy is closed, and ICANN will discuss the comments at the upcoming meeting in Los Angeles from 27 October to 2 November 2007.
The opposition to ICANN gTLD censorship was spearheaded by the advocacy group Keep the Core Neutral, which believes that "the Internet’s influence has become too important to allow public policy matters to be decided by a private institution that has fundamental and systematic flaws undermining its accountability to the public."
At the end of the commenting period, ICANN had received about 80 comments, with more than 60 of them being critical of its censorship policy.
"The proposed challenge process allows too much subjective uncertainty in what should be a completely objective, transparent and well-defined application procedure," System Administrator Charles Hall wrote. "It requires ICANN to judge cases for which it has no established institutional capacity or granted rights, and sets up a completely spurious legal jurisdiction without any accountable political authority. It would also allow wealthier and more powerful gTLD applicants to hijack the application process, suppress competition and innovation, and generally establish more firmly entrenched gatekeeper power in the market for gTLDs."
"Morality on the Internet is none of ICANN's business," Phillip Cripps noted. "The internet is a global network and cannot be made to fit the so-called morals of everyone. The same goes for the proposed trademark policy. It is outrageous and illegal. You cannot control the content of the Internet. Please confine yourselves to the actual purpose for which you were created: technical and operational matters."
Voices in support of ICANN plan believe that a free-for-all gTLD policy could lead to abuse.
"We know much of this is about the dot-XXX proposal, or at least that's the poster-child," Seth Finkelstein commented. "The dot-XXX rent-seeking business model is just a taste of what's likely to happen, if the speculators and scammers get free reign. There's just too many venture capitalists who have the idea of making the domain system into their own private money machine - "domaining" and SiteFinder and .cm and so on, give ample evidence of those efforts."
Post new comment