John and all, I would think you would recognize that ethno-centric or national-centric slurs are not appropriate. Evidently I am mistaken? John Levine wrote:
Gee, here I am, the cynical American arguing against the idealistic Italian. So much for stereotypes.
I am not speaking about "stereotypes of national character"
Hmmn. Someone purporting to be you wrote this a couple of days ago.
... a recommendation which is actaully obvious for 95% of the world, but which seems to hurt the intellectuals of a specific developed country which accounts for less than 5% of the world's population but which is disproportionately represented in ICANN for historical reasons.
Also, you might want to review the message you were responding it. I didn't say that I was in favor of a flood of immoral TLDs. I said that ICANN's history makes it extraordinarily unlikely that ICANN could make such judgements.
Take a look at the GNSO report at http://gnso.icann.org/meetings/minutes-gnso-06sep07.shtml. As someone recently pointed out on CircleID, recommendation 6, the one about morality and public order, has already been hijacked by the trademark lawyers, who added the WIPO treaties and TRIPS to the list of governing principles of law. While I expect that .DISNEY would upset a certain number of people in Burbank and Orlando, it's hard to see it as immoral or disorderly.
Furthermore, the contextual issues are incredibly subtle, even for an organization with more political ability than ICANN. For example, there's a domain nigger.com, which is just about the worst racial slur there is in American English. But it belongs to the NAACP, a 99 year old civil rights advocacy organization. What if a group of Holocaust museums wanted to register .NAZI to host historical and educational resources? Would that be OK? What's the process to decide? I don't know the answer, and neither does anyone else, but I am quite confident that it will take years for ICANN to come to a non-answer, during which nothing will happen except that some lawyers will bill a lot of hours.
R's, John
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