Zittrain Ponders ICANN Petition
Over at the Concurring Opinions blog, Oxford University Web expert Jonathan Zittrain ponders whether the global petition for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to "keep the core neutral" petition is something worth signing.
Technology Daily reported on the new campaign on Thursday. Organizers want ICANN to resist efforts to evaluate proposed domain suffixes based on non-technical criteria such as ideas about morality and competing national political objectives.
Zittrain said he thinks the petition "reads a bit vague" and he finds it "hard to really care if ICANN wants to allow some names and deny others." "I don't see how a willingness to have some content-based process for determining new TLDs can become 'a convenient lever of global control by those seeking to censor unpopular or controversial expression on the Internet,'" he said.
IP Justice fellow Dan Krimm, who is spearheading the effort, responded to Zittrain's "who cares" attitude by arguing that the issue poses a slippery slope: "Allowing ICANN to establish a procedural and jurisdictional precedent in the area of domain names where non-technical public policy can be formulated on a global basis may provide a very attractive venue to expand beyond DNS to matters of more general public policy in Internet governance."
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