Re: [soac-mapo] Some comments about MAPO

[Richard Tindal <richardtindal@xxxxxx>]

Thanks for this Olivier.

You and others have made a strong case that the DAG should not have an 
objections process for strings considered contrary to morality and public order.

I think it remains a valid option for MOPO to be removed entirely from the DAG

GAC comments on this should be available in the next week or so.   I look 
forward to seeing them.

RT


On Jul 20, 2010, at 8:16 AM, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:

> 
> 
> I've read through all of the discussions so-far and have had my hair
> stand on its end when reading some submissions.
> On the other hand, I completely agree with and support the positions of
> my friends and colleagues at ALAC & NCUC.
> 
> To summarise my position, I'll quote some history which I sent to the At
> Large GTLD working group but which is sometimes missing from ICANN debates.
> 
> "Once upon a time, a long long time ago, pre-ICANN, pre-NSF,
> pre-Internic, pre-NetSol and pre-Verisign, there were only a handful of
> Gods in "this world", which included but were not limited to Vint Cerf,
> Jon Postel, and the US Dept. of Defense (I am mentioning these names
> solely to give you an era, not to tell you who was involved in
> decisions). In those days, the Gods looked at their creature and found
> out that some common (bad) humans were corrupting it with 4-letter
> words. So a small list was drawn to blacklist those 4-letter words from
> being registered under gTLDs.
> Of course, this list only existed for those words in English. And for
> many years, this baby grew into a happy and pure child. And then it
> learnt other languages, and suddenly, it knew "bad" words in other
> languages, and its new adoptive parents thought that it made no sense to
> restrict the list of those "bad" words in English if they were allowed
> in other languages.
> It was simply too hard to make a list of all offensive words in all
> languages, including variants, typos, phonetic and visual commonality.
> 
> As a result, the list of blacklisted words was dropped.
> 
> To summarise, I'll include a proverb (author unknown) espoused by an ex
> US President:
> "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" - Ronald Reagan"
> 
> It is *impossible* to have internationally-recognised morality rules as
> long as some countries in the world don't recognise paedophilia as an
> immoral thing. I don't know how ICANN would plan to define such rules -
> I know there are bright people about, but this is going one stretch too
> far. How can ICANN make sure that a specific word will not offend
> someone, somewhere in some language or other? Of course, it can't and
> the historical proof is the one which resulted in the "Gods" in my story
> above, to drop any kind of blacklist.
> 
> Let individual governments rule on their own territory.
> Will it lead to a break-up of the Internet? Absolutely not - because the
> vast majority of applicants for new gTLDs will make sure their gTLD is
> palatable to as many people/countries as possible. The "extremists" will
> obviously apply for theirs too. They might be banned by some countries.
> Their choice.
> 
> You know, it struck me that there might be another parallel to
> everything that's happening at ICANN in the new gTLD creation process,
> and that's the history of USENET. Objectionable newsgroup names were
> seldom carried and one ended up with a USENET feed with all of the "good
> groups" and a handful of optional "less good" groups which weren't
> always carried everywhere. That's what might end up in the DNS. And if
> you're going to tell me that USENET is pretty much dead, I'd reply that
> the reasons for USENET's death are completely independent of newsgroup
> naming.
> 
> Anyway, I've already spoken too much. I hope that ICANN's trend of
> turning every stone in the world before launching new gTLDs will soon
> end. Heck, I might purchase a plot of land and ask ICANN to plough it
> for me if the trend continues that way. :-)
> 
> Warmest regards,
> 
> Olivier
> 
> -- 
> Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond, PhD
> http://www.gih.com/ocl.html
> 
>