Interesting ICANN story on NPR

[Dan Krimm]

My take on this is that it is a very short "news item" about two things:

(1) certain actions are pending at ICANN (very basic information)
(2) some opinions about it from Government critics and ICANN itself
("balanced" opinion from "authoritative sources")

There is not actual hard reporting in the sense of analyzing what new
gTLDs really would mean.  It's just he-said/she-said dueling opinions. 
"Reporting" as enhanced stenography.

Yuki Noguchi is apparently not much of an expert in these areas (she
covers a pretty broad beat at NPR), and can't offer her own assessment
based on substantial empirical investigation.  That's what real
journalists used to do back in the day when they were properly resourced. 
And frankly, NPR is in better shape than most, and probably puts out
better information overall than most commercial news orgs in the US, by
comparison.

The best I can say about this little item is that it alerts a general
public to the fact that there is something going here that they may want
to try to pay attention to.  But they're going to have to search out a
better information source to really understand it, because you can't trust
the "balance of opinion" approach in contemporary journalism, because it
puts legitimate expert info up against pull-out-of-your-butt smokescreens
as if they were equivalent.  The educated observer will simply try to find
out what is really going on by looking elsewhere.

That's the one thing Noguchi missed in this piece: a "link" to more expert
resources.

Dan


-- 
Any opinions expressed in this message are those of the author alone and
do not necessarily reflect any position of the author's employer.



On Thu, January 12, 2012 11:57 am, warigia bowman wrote:
> Here is the NPR article if anyone wants to take a look.
>
> http://www.npr.org/2012/01/12/145042807/critics-see-disaster-in-expansion-of-domain-names
>
> a clip . . .
>
> "Beckstrom says ICANN deliberated this move for six years and will take
> steps to protect brand names. Besides, he says, there is demand for the
> new
> domains.
>
> But Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, disagrees.
>
> "My sense is that a lot of this demand is just absolutely artificial and
> largely imagined by the ICANN board," Leibowitz says. "We're an agency
> that's required to protect consumers, and from our perspective, this is a
> potential disaster and we have an obligation ... to speak out."
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 1:47 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> don't fall for commercial fear mongering -  have a read:
>> http://www.mediaterrorism.net/
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 9:11 PM, warigia bowman
>> <warigia at aucegypt.edu>wrote:
>>
>>> There was an ICANN story on NPR this morning. It made it sound like the
>>> extra domain names are a big mistake, and are going to add confusion to
>>> the
>>> Internet, and force people to do defensive spending to protect that IP
>>> in
>>> cyberspace.
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>>
>>> Rigia
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>