The Chair of ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee has issued a statement on the censorship of top level domain names. We are sad to report that the alleged GAC position is deeply flawed and outrageously wrong-headed. It is a recipe for global censorship, and although at this point it only applies to the DNS it can lead to the erosion of all internet freedom of expression unless it is stoutly resisted.
Open letter to the U.S. Goverment on domain name censorship
Editor's note: The following letter was initially sent privately to the U.S. government's representatives in ICANN. It asks why they - like all other governmental representatives - are completely absent from an ICANN group discussing the way to handle "sensitive" or "objectionable" top level domain name proposals. So far, I've...
ICANN does the right thing on .xxx – but will the GAC?
It still isn't over.
At its public forum Thursday, the ICANN Board indicated its willingness to accept and act in accordance with the findings of an Independent Review Panel that ruled it had treated the .xxx top level domain application unfairly. In a presentation from its General Counsel, ICANN bowed to justice and issued two important declarations.
ICANN and GAC discuss censorship
At the Brussels meeting between ICANN's Board and its Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), a fascinating and important discussion took place over the right of ICANN to censor or restrict the kind of words that can be used as top level domain names. The issues being debated here have profound implications for global regulation of internet content.
China: Real-name registration required in online bulletins
Last month, in a speech to China's top legislature, Wang Chen, director of State Council Information Office of China, introduced that “we are also exploring an identity authentication system for users of online bulletin board systems”. Identity authentication, or real-name registration in China’s online environment has been discussed intensively in the past few years, however, Wang Chen’s speech is regarded as the first official announcement of the government enforcement to disable anonymity in popular news portals and business websites.
Light shed on the Google-Italy case
Two Italian law scholars, G. Sartor and M. Viola, have written up a nice description and analysis, in English, of the Judge's decision convicting Google executives of “processing health data without authorization,” apparently a criminal offense. Based on their description, the decision seems like a technically incompetent one as well as having bad policy implications.
How much DNS is blocked in China?
The most recent episode of The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast offers up some disturbing corroborating evidence as to the extent of DNS filtering and outright blocking occurring in China. VeriSign's Matt Larson and InfoBlox's Cricket Liu, who co-host the geeky yet engaging and extremely informative show, held a roundtable discussion including technical experts from dynamic name service providers (better known as “managed DNS” services) DynDNS, TZO, No-IP, and DotQuad, as well as Google and Comcast.
After recalling the recent episode where queries to Net Nod's instance of the i root were intercepted and tampered with resulting in incorrect responses being returned inside and outside of China for facebook.com and other websites, Larson posed the question whether others were having similar experiences. (NB: Net Nod's i-root server instance in Beijing is still shut down, as their CEO has apparently stated it is not possible to offer authoritative root service in China) Unfortunately, several of the managed DNS services providers answered affirmatively.
Groundhog Day: 10,000 reminders of why ICANN’s public comment period on the .xxx domain is stupid
We knew – and we suspect that ICANN knew – that calling for public comment on the future of the .xxx domain after ICANN was slapped on the wrist for its mishandling of the proposal was a useless procedure. Now we have confirmation. As we approach the comment deadline (May 10), we have a flood (6,000 and counting) of comments from the same rightwing religious groups that mobilized against .xxx back in June and July of 2005. We also have another 150 comments from the Free Speech Coalition – a group of online porn providers who also didn’t like the idea 5 years ago and mobilized against it. And a petition with thousands of signatures for xxx. Does this sound vaguely familiar?
Google's Leaving China-What do Chinese People Think?
Google announced its new approach in China: An update in March, 22, 2010, two month after its initial announcement in January that the company no longer wants to operate a filtered search engine in China. The final decision is to redirect Google.cn to Google.com.hk to provide uncensored search in simplified Chinese.
Google launched Google.cn in January 2006, agreeing to follow the requirement from the government of China that the search engine would censor input queries and offer filtered results. Some of the sensitive keywords will return no results and some will return filtered results with the notice “According to the local law and regulation, some of the search results are not displayed.”
There’s more to the Google-Italy case than meets the eye
Intermediary liability has become one of the critical flashpoints of Internet governance. A few weeks ago, we celebrated an Australian court decision that denied a bid by copyright holders to make ISPs liable for copyright infringement by people who happened to be using their networks. Yesterday, we learned of an Italian court decision that seems to have pointed in the opposite direction. Google executives were convicted of a privacy violation because of a video that one of their millions of users posted. The decision raises major concerns as it seems to require Internet intermediaries to monitor user generated content, which would be a disaster for the freedom and openness of the Internet.
But there is more to this case than meets the eye. US news coverage, which concentrates solely on Google’s outraged claims, fails to take into account three broader issues: 1) the fact that Google itself has undercut its exemption from liability by implementing monitoring of copyright; 2) the weakness, vagueness and obsolescence of the EU E-Commerce Directive’s liability protection provisions; 3) the politics in Europe and the way privacy law can be used – for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons – to attack this large global corporation that threatens the business models of entrenched interests.
