John Levine wrote:
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.
The standard deflection of this point was that ICANN intended to outsource the actual determination of what was moral to some yet-undetermined third parties. Twomey was proudly proclaiming that they'd been in negotiations with a number of services who had claimed the ability -- or at least the willingness -- to serve as such outsourced bodies. How misguided. I've been involved with professional mediation services before. At their best they are reasonably good at judging on issues such as disputed contract language and even family disputes, or areas where there is at least minimal common ground. It seems to me at least that morality is something that goes well beyond their scope (just as it goes beyond ICANN's scope). Does the government of Saudi Arabia have sole jurisdiction over the use of .islam? Some say it does. How do you arbitrate that without engaging in evaluation of fundamental human beliefs, causing unspeakable insult to the "losing" side? At what point does ICANN -- or its officially mandated outsourced agents -- determine whose god is more correct? What gives them the right? There is extremely little common ground in morality outside of a very small number of commonly accepted sources of revulsion. Child pornography is one such example of universal condemnation -- though even here, I would note that most of the use of the Usenet alt.sex.paedophelia newsgroups was by anti-child-porn activists, not the smut peddlars themselves. And, as has been stated, the net already has all kind of objectionable content in a .com world in which the only allowable objections to namespace strings have been trademark related. As one of the vote takers for newsgroups in the "formal" newsgroups -- rec.*, comp.*, soc.* -- I had more than my fill of morality arguments in the realm of namespace maintenance ... and yet here, the combination of national laws and social self-policing has already demonstrated to prove effective without the need for a formal objection mechanism.
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.
An even trickier example would be .apple, which can be used for both benign and multiple corporate uses. Would a computer maker or a music producer object to its use to promote fruit? - Evan