Important point - the Internet is secular

[Marc Perkel]

I think one thing that is important to realize is that the Internet must
be kept secular. Secular means that it welcomes all forms of belief or
non-belief equally. Reality is optional. God is optional.

I'm in the process of writing a brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals in a religious rights case where "what is secular" is one of the
issues. One of the conclusions I came to is that my religion, the Church
of Reality, is not secular.

Many people, both religious and non-religious, think secular means
Atheism. But Atheist are not secular. Secular means an indifference to a
point of view. Thus "secular values" are limited to the lowest common
denominator of values that are included in all of sociery. And when you
combine that with the fact that ICANN is not a law enforcement agency,
even if it is illegal it not our job to do anything about it. Our
mission is to make the Internet work, not to be the thought police.

Fast Flux, for example, is possibly interesting to us because it tampers
with the working of the Internet. Fraud, while interesting to me
personally (I'm in the spam filtering business), is probably beyond the
scope of our mission. Protecting people from dangerous idea is
definitely outside of our mission. Filtering porn is not our job.

As a organization that serves the international community we have to
stay narrowly focused on what we are supposed to be doing and not let
ourselves suffer mission creep and get into area where we should not go.
Because we serve all religions and non-religions we can not accept a
religious position. Because we serve all nations we can not be in law
enforcement because different nations have different laws. Even on
issues that are universally immoral, or universally illegal, it's not
our job. It's not what we do.

If we have a mission it is to actively keep ICANN religiously and
nationally neutral. To fight against attempts of religions or nations to
use ICANN as a tool to restrict what people do online. If we lose our
secularity we lose our legitimacy.

However, if we are going to pick a religion to be the standard of
morality enforcer, I nominate my religion. The Church of Reality. :)

Marc Perkel
First One
Church of Reality
"Reality changed my life - it can change your's too!"