RE: [soac-mapo] charter and mission

[Milton L Mueller <mueller@xxxxxxx>]

> What specifically makes it [MAPO] unworkable?

This has already been explained, but I will do it again in more detail. 

The law relating to MAPO is an EXCEPTIONS process. It allows national 
governments to refuse to recognize things that other governments recognize and 
that they would be obligated by treaty to recognize, by invoking their own, 
_local_ standard of morality/public order. 

Example: suppose Denmark (used entirely for illustration purposes) grants the 
trademark <obsceneword>. Under international treaties other countries are 
supposed to recognize that TM. But with the MAPO exception a country (say, 
Burundi) can say, "sorry, we don't recognize that TM in our country." In other 
words, MAPO does _not_ allow Burundi to shoot down the granting of the TM 
<obsceneword> in Denmark and everywhere else in the world. It simply allows 
Burundi to exempt itself from recognition of that trademark in its own 
jurisdiction. 

To summarize, MAPO explicitly recognizes that there _are no_ globally 
applicable standards of morality and public order! It is an exceptions process 
that restricts the applicability of a global agreement within a national 
jurisdiction. 

Now if you wanted to translate the MAPO approach directly into the TLD 
name-granting process, here is how it would work. Someone proposes a TLD; 
specific countries would object to those TLDs as conflicting with their own 
local standards of MAPO. Therefore they would announce that they would be 
blocking the TLD _in their country_, or preventing registrars in their country 
from selling it or customers from registering it, etc. But their objection 
would have NO EFFECT outside of their own country. 

A very important distinction, no?

As it is now, ICANN's MAPO is constructed to give one country or a small group 
of countries the right to make a _global_ decision based on their own, 
parochial standards of morality and public order. This is not only uworkable, 
it is wrong. Since there is absolutely NO international consensus on such a 
standard, this is a highly repressive and unacceptable standard - aside from 
having no basis in international law. 

--MM