First it was China, experimenting with its own special DNS name space and its own Great cyber-Wall to guard what content can and cannot enter the country. Now, Putin's Russia is said to be planning to give it a try. From IGP's extensive network of spies in Moscow (well, ok, it's actually from a two month-old Russian newspaper), we learn that the Security Council of the Russian Federation has declared that Russia will create its own Web, in Cyrillic, “completely independent from the traditional WWW.” Several reasons were cited for the creation of an independent network. One was — surprise — “information safety and security.” The newspaper writes: “Today it is a matter of fact that Russian users are accessing the internet via channels which are in the control of the US government.”
ICANN confronts Free Expression Debate
At the San Juan, Puerto Rico ICANN meeting today a large audience turned out for a workshop organized to discuss the free expression implications of ICANN's proposed policy for adding new top level domains. The issue has proved controversial because governments and ICANN staff are concerned about the appearance of controversial words or concepts in the domain name space. Some of them were traumatized by the .xxx debate and think they can get around those problems simply by blocking TLD applications that might be “offensive” or “sensitive” to some people.
ICANN staff searched very hard for international law and treaties that would justify these actions. One was a 19th century trademark treaty known as the Paris Convention which excludes from trademark registration words that are “scandalous” or contrary to “generally accepted legal norms relating to morality and public order.” Until we insisted on amendments, the report also selectively quoted the UN Charter on Human Rights, avoiding the free expression guarantees of Article 19. The main problem, however, was the U.S. government-supported GAC principles, which among other things tried to give governments a veto power over any new TLD and required that any proposal respect “the sensitivities regarding terms with national, cultural, geographic and religious significance.” These were seen as opening the door to casual censorship based not on law but opinion and preference.
Moderated by Robin Gross (IP Justice, Noncommercial Users Constituency), expert speakers challenged the proposed policy’s challenges to freedom of expression and an open and neutral administration of Internet core resources.
A2K Conference at Yale: Some Observations
I am attending the Yale Information Society Project's second Access to Knowledge (A2K) conference. There are about 150 people here. The story is that the leaders of Yale ISP are self-consciously positioning A2K as a social movement and simultaneously putting forward A2K as an overarching master frame for the entire range of communication and information policy issues. (For a broad historical background on communication-information as an integrated policy domain and the convergence of multiple issue networks, including intellectual propert-related advocacy, around the problems of digital media, see our study Reinventing Media Activism, published in 2004.)
ICANN kills .xxx, USG ordered to turn over related documents
ICANN finally made a decision to kill the .xxx application, with the Board voting 9-5 against it. In a bad sign for the future, the vote indicated that ICANN's approach to top level domains will be to block any proposed that are politically or culturally controversial. ICM registry responded by...
Resistance grows to TLD censorship by ICANN
Another statement voicing opposition to the efforts by ICANN's Government Advisory Committee to assert censorship authority over new top level domain strings has been released. Written by Michael Palage and Avri Doria, it shows how widespread and deep the concerns have become. Palage is a former ICANN Board member, an...
eBay Globalizes the Net Neutrality Debate
Following on its public meeting on net neutrality the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has posted the comments of many participants and (almost exclusively American) commentators. The comments follow the usual ideological divides; many are quite informative and detailed with regard to economic, legal and technical aspects. One comment in particular...
The Triple-X TLD: The Beauty Contest from Hell
Just when you thought the .xxx affair couldn’t get any worse, it does. I’m beginning to think that ICANN’s approach to TLD approval was cooked up by a demented sergeant from Abu Ghraib.
On March 13, the ICANN board is set to vote – again – on whether they can approve ICM’s Registry’s application to operate a domain reserved for adult online content: .xxx. This will be the third or fourth time this has happened. I have lost count. The same thing keeps happening again and again. ICANN tells ICM registry, the company applying for the domain, something is wrong with its application and something more needs to be done to get approval. ICM registry dutifully goes off and does what was asked. And then ICANN thinks of something else that is wrong, something else it has to do. It’s Lucy, Charlie Brown and the football, on a global scale and costing millions of dollars in money and time.
Net Neutrality and the Wireless Internet
Since September I have been working on research on the wireless Internet, and specifically on the application of net neutrality principles to the mobile internet. I began this work at the OECD while I was in Paris on sabbatical. This topic seems to be a hot one. In November Nokia caught wind of it and I was invited to speak in Finland January 18 to present the work in progress. I was also invited to speak on wireless NN at the University of Tilburg (Netherlands) Law and Economics Center (TILEC) February 9. Upon returning from Tilburg I learned that Columbia's Tim Wu had released a paper on…Wireless Net Neutrality. (Beaten to the punch, eh? My report involves a lot more data collection and analysis than Tim's and will have to be reviewed by OECD, so it will be months before it can be released.) One immediate effect of my “testing the waters” presentations was to convince me that net neutrality is no longer a US-specific issue.
Apple versus the Record Companies
Steve Jobs has made a proposal that is worthy of discussion in Internet governance circles.
GoDaddy Abruptly Silences Website
As reported by CNet, GoDaddy, the world's largest domain name registrar, pulled a well known security website's domain name (Seclists.org) last week after receiving a complaint from MySpace. MySpace, a popular social networking site, complained that sensitive, but not necessarily illegal, user information was being displayed improperly. Seclists.org, which archives...
