John and all, Odd, I thought that Milton's quoted statement that you took exception with John, was percisely accurate given the known and documented history of ICANN thus far. I don't think anyone is expecting perfection from ICANN, but given the history of public input and access to same without restriction of any sort is significantly lacking and selective censorship has been a regular practice on ICANN forums such as this one. This I believe, and should be clear is what Milton was referring to. -----Original Message-----

From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> Sent: May 12, 2008 10:24 AM To: Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org> Cc: At-Large Worldwide <alac@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Subject: Re: [At-Large] House Leaders Urge Preservation Of ICANN Role (US)

...

In other words, ICANN _does_ support freedom of expression ... to the same extent as the US government does. ;-)

As so often happens, Milton collects a lot of interesting facts, then utterly fails to understand what they mean.

The most important thing that ICANN has done to support freedom of speech has been to make domain names almost completely disconnected from whatever the names are used for and cheap enough that the price of a domain is insignificant compared to all the other stuff you need to publish on the net. With remarkably few exceptions, you can register a domain name in any GTLD and use it for whatever you want. Sure, it's not perfect, and you don't have to tell me that the UDRP is tilted toward trademark owners, but if you look at the number of UDRP actions compared to the number of domains, for the vast majority of domain owners it's a non-issue.

The .XXX foofaraw is a meaningless sideshow. The pornographers for whom it was putatively created have been notably unenthusiastic about it, and the absence of .XXX doesn't seem to have presented much of a bar to publishing more porn than you could look at in a hundred lifetimes.

R's, John

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