All, FYI, and of course for those that have been paying close attention Koven and Milton are unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your political bent, correct. Koven in particular as far as the facts are concerned did a good job in articulating in brief, in correctly outlining what ICANN's direction and to a degree, dilemma is. Everybody got some of what they wanted, but no one got everything of all of what they wanted/needed in respect to the gTLD and IDN gTLD decision by ICANN. Of course much of that decision by ICANN will need flushing out in detail in the coming months. What will be interesting is to what degree colisions will exist and what "Social Values" of whom will be impacted vis a vi gTLD's and especially IDN gTLD's. Ergo, it is likely that .XXX will be re-approved and the "Social Values" Social scientests will have something to debate and argue about for years to come. My take is that .XXX for instance will be moved offshore so that USG influence will be limited, and congress will commence to pass legislation to mitigate or limit access and under what conditions access and registration will be allowed as well as determin criminality of accessing Domain Names in .XXX amongsts other gTLD's and IDN gTLD's. China will than not be the only country with a "Great Firewall". -------- Original Message -------- Subject: RE: [governance] IGF workshop: Internet for All (v 2.0) Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2008 04:14:19 -0400 From: "Milton L Mueller" <mueller@syr.edu> Reply-To: governance@lists.cpsr.org,"Milton L Mueller" <mueller@syr.edu> To: <governance@lists.cpsr.org>,<KovenRonald@aol.com> References: <d10.2d047f76.359d015a@aol.com> From:KovenRonald@aol.com [mailto:KovenRonald@aol.com] Yes, Avri -- Reaffirming Art., 29 was the price that our Chinese friends and other likeminded delegations made us pay for reaffirming Art. 19. That's what we get for working thru the UN system and illustrates what to expect if we try to fiddle too much with the ICANN arrangements to which so many civil society members are allergic. Better the devil you know ... But Rony, in case you hadn’t noticed, ICANN has NEITHER Article 19 NOR Article 29 NOR the US First Amendment. And ICANN has just passed (again, you must not be paying attention) a new gTLD policy that reflects exactly what your Chinese friends wanted, not to mention European advocates of other kinds of restrictions on expression. I will send you the links if you are interested (but I suspect you are not). Do you like the idea of prior restraint for ALL expression in domain names? Do you like the idea that a government can object to a name because it is in a language script that they think they own and they want a veto power over anyone using {Chinese/Korean/Cyrillic/your favorite language here}? Do you like the idea of global standards of “public order and morality” being applied in advance to any and all applications? I hope you do, because that is all part of the new ICANN policy. So before you invoke ICANN pay attention to the facts, please. I really wonder what you WPFC folks are thinking some times. Does the fact that ICANN has a “made in the USA” sticker on it mean that you will defend it to the death regardless of what it does? There are no allergies here to ICANN per se or to its model, there are allergies to censorship, arbitrary power and the like. Anyway, getting back to Internet for All, it is meaningless to declare sweeping new “rights” when the “right” in question is just a nice-sounding set of words and one has neither the resources nor c clear definition of what it means in practice, nor the political consensus and institutional capacity to deliver it on a global basis. We should rather be asking, “what policies have actually succeeded in expanding Internet access as rapidly as possible and “what policies do the best job of ameliorating unacceptable levels of inequality in access?” Those are realistic questions that can be answered with realistic and implementable policies. Declaring universal rights makes the declarer feel righteous but accomplishes nothing else, except perhaps to devalue the more fundamental rights that are still not being protected. Regards, Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 281k members/stakeholders strong!) "Obedience of the law is the greatest freedom" - Abraham Lincoln "Credit should go with the performance of duty and not with what is very often the accident of glory" - Theodore Roosevelt "If the probability be called P; the injury, L; and the burden, B; liability depends upon whether B is less than L multiplied by P: i.e., whether B is less than PL." United States v. Carroll Towing (159 F.2d 169 [2d Cir. 1947] =============================================================== Updated 1/26/04 CSO/DIR. Internet Network Eng. SR. Eng. Network data security IDNS. div. of Information Network Eng. INEG. INC. ABA member in good standing member ID 01257402 E-Mail jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com My Phone: 214-244-4827 ____________________________________________________________ You received this message as a subscriber on the list: governance@lists.cpsr.org To be removed from the list, send any message to: governance-unsubscribe@lists.cpsr.org For all list information and functions, see: http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance