Response to consultation - Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc
Comments: Electronic Frontiers Australia Incorporated is a not-for-profit incorporated association concerned with civil liberties and regulation in relation to the Internet. Members of EFA are regular attendees at ICANN conferences and take a keen interest in the development of naming policy for gTLDs. The proposal that new gTLDs should be subject to censorship on the basis of morality and public order is strongly opposed by EFA. It's a bad idea in the global Internet and threatens to promote further limits freedom of expression in ccTLDs. Unfortunately, however well-intentioned the proposal may be in seeking to accommodate the many censorious regimes and interest groups, the proposal builds political interference in the DNS. ICANN will never be equipped to find consensus on matters of personal and cultural preference, nor balance freedom of expression against extreme individual opinions. Rather than start trying to make policy that pleases everyone, ICANN would do better to hold to the defensible position that the DNS is a technical operation and all combinations of characters that could be a gTLD remain available for delegation in the event of a successful business case for same. The concern about "function creep" of trademark law is well founded and would represent an entry by lawyers into a higher layer of Internet architecture. EFA endorses the views of the Keep the core neutral! campaign. Kimberley Heitman, for the Board of EFA www.efa.org.au |