FW: [ncsg-policy] Draft NCSG comments to GNSO Council on Rec 6

[Andrew A. Adams]

I disagree with Dwi and Schombe here. The reason that the ALAC statement
stressed that settled international law (UN resolutions and treaties with
broad though not necessarily universal accession) should form the only basis
on which objections could be made is precisely because of the vast
differences in national law and culture which the Internet spans. Should
.jihad be banned because the term Jihad has been misinterpreted to mean the
armed struggle by Muslims against non-Muslims? Should .ira be banned from
introduction as a financial services TLD because of the terrorist association
with that name (and various modifiers) still in operation in Northern
Ireland? Should .poppy be banned from being adopted by peace campaigners and
war dead remembrance sites because the poppy is the source of opiates?

So far, yes, NCSG has supported the creation of .xxx because there has been
no solid argument put forward that its existence would have any significant
net (sorry for the pun) effect on the amount of erotic material (or porn, or
obscenity, YMMV) available online.

The world is too complex for most short strings to be objectionable in
anythign but a highly localised and subjective way. As far as I can tell
about the only things which might reasonably be banned from creation as
generics are things that can cause confusion (such as recognised country
names) and a very small set which most would agree are too troubling for
almost everyone (the only one of these that comes to my mind is .paedophile).

Artificial scarcity is one of the things holding back the Internet from
achieving its full transformative potential. Let's not collude in another
attempt to re-inforce this scarcity.



--
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/