Must give a shout out to my friend Susan Crawford, who has stuck with the mess-that-is-ICANN long after my patience got exhausted. Susan tells it like it is on ICANN’s rejection of the .XXX TLD proposal.
The ICANN Board rejected, by a vote of 9-5, a proposal to establish a .xxx domain. As I reported some time back, the .xxx proposal attracted all the wrong kinds of interest from the United States government and governments around the world — who apparently decided it was o.k. for th U.S. to flex its muscle over ICANN is it kept the “all porn all the time” domain out of cyberspace. (Although the EU now appears annoyed at this “political interference.”) Apparently, these governments have a the theory that .xxx would somehow generate more porn in cyberspace.
On the other hand, civil libertarians and the porn industry itself are happy that it got killed, because they feared it would create “cyberzoning” that would limit porn to just the .xxx domain. But whether or not folks think it was a good idea, the fact that it looked on track fro approval until the USG intervened raises troubling questions.
Susan Crawford, now one of ICANN’s directors, wrote this excellent dissent on the rejection the .XXX tld proposal. As always, the key questions are not necessarily about results (for example, whether anyone really wanted a .XXX TLD or not), but about process.
So my thanks to Susan for sticking with the ICANN stuff. While I’ve moved on to other fights, I’m grateful to those still fighting in that (and other) arenas against the continuing encroachment of big government and big business on our essential freedoms.
Stay tuned . . .