Free Expression Online

If you've been following our coverage recently, you'll want to sign the petition telling the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that you oppose a U.S. Commerce Department proposal to give the world’s governments arbitrary power over the Internet’s domain name system.

The proposal would give national governments the right to block the creation of new web site addresses. Proposals for new top level domains could be vetoed by the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) of ICANN “for any reason.” This means that governments could object simply because the name is controversial, or because one or two governments don’t like the applicant, or because an authoritarian government wants to suppress the kind of content that might be published under a specific top level domain name.

The proposal will be discussed at the upcoming ICANN Brussels special meeting on Feb 28.  Don't waste a second, sign the petition today!

Our warnings against the GAC top level domain veto are getting attention. The story has been picked up by Ars Technica, CBS and CNET News and widely tweeted. An interesting new argument has surfaced in this controversy. As more and more reporters ask the U.S. government what the heck it is doing, the NTIA is issuing a stock answer. NTIA is telling reporters that its proposed veto procedure “diminishes the potential for blocking of top level domain strings considered objectionable by governments. This type of blocking harms the architecture of the DNS and undermines the goal of universal resolvability (i.e., a single global Internet that facilitates the free flow of goods and services and freedom of expression).” That's doublespeak. Let's translate it into plain English.

Early yesterday the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission released its 324 page annual report to Congress. The lead story in the press has been an April 2010 BGP incident. While the underlying technical problems of BGP are well known and similar situations occur frequently, the incident is being painted ominously as a routing “hijack” that affected traffic to U.S. government websites – something which China Telecom is denying and which Renesys and Arbor Networks have done a good job of refuting. Another incident in the report, not mentioned in the press, was the March 2010 tampering of DNS responses from an i-root instance located in Beijing, which resulted in some Internet users from outside of China being blocked from reaching certain websites that are censored inside of China. Congress, which is now considering the Combatting Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act (COICA), would be well served to read how using the DNS to implement a domestic policy agenda is a bad idea.

ICANN’s staff is trying to reject key consensus recommendations regarding the censorship of new top level domains. The staff's “explanatory memo,” which tells us why it is trying to discard the decisions of a Cross-community Working Group, show a complete lack of interest in the freedom of expression implications of the new gTLD objection process. It focuses instead on how to lower legal and financial risks to the corporation. Outsourcing the decision to censor new top level domains to a “dispute resolution service provider” is considered by ICANN's staff to be a very important part of a “risk mitigation strategy.” “Without outside dispute resolution,” the staff wrote, “ICANN would have to re-evaluate risks and program costs overall.” What a startling admission! A conference call tomorrow (Monday, November 15) may be able to alter this. But the staff position fuels many of the concerns IGP and others have expressed regarding ICANN, Inc.’s status as an international institution. ICANN Inc.’s policy process looks out for its own interest as a corporation first and foremost, and lacks accountability because there is no requirement to follow the results of its own vaunted bottom-up processes.

Frustrated with the contradiction between the limits of jurisdictional authority and the Internet’s globalized access to information, more and more governments are instituting measures to block access to web sites which are deemed illegal in their territory but are located outside their jurisdiction. A bill introduced in the U.S. Senate on Monday would start to put into place an infrastructure for maintaining a black list of censored domain names. The purpose is not political censorship but blocking in the name of copyright and brand protection. The proposed bill is called the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). It’s a radical change in internet policy masquerading as a strengthening of copyright enforcement. COICA and similar measures are not designed to identify and catch the perpetrators of crimes or even, primarily, to take down the illegal web site or content. They are designed to prevent ordinary users of the internet from being able to connect to or transact with the infringing sites. In other words, they substitute regulation of the general public’s internet access for prosecution of crimes committed by specific people in specific locations.