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Re: [soac-mapo] Third "draft recommendation" (individual government objections)

  • To: soac-mapo <soac-mapo@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Subject: Re: [soac-mapo] Third "draft recommendation" (individual government objections)
  • From: Robin Gross <robin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2010 13:31:52 -0700

I am also concerned that some governments want to use this new gtld policy to impose local customs or sensitivities onto the rest of world via ICANN. This is exactly the kind of manipulation for political purposes that ICANN needs to be protected from if it is to do its job of managing technical issues effectively. ICANN cannot "be all things to all people" and become the agency responsible from protecting people from ideas or information they don't agree with.
If govts have objections to the global accessibility of strings, they  
need to be grounded in international law to get anywhere.  Objections  
need clear boundaries or they risk being abused and conflicting with  
other principles.  This is true for any objection.
Best,
Robin




On Sep 7, 2010, at 1:06 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote:

> I guess in that sense all objections (not just Recommendation 6 ones)
> are 'requests to veto' from the Objecting party  (although in the
> Objection process a possible outcome is some form of agreement
> between the two parties).

OK, then you have conceded my point and proven to both Chuck and Bertrand that my concerns were not based on a misunderstanding of what was proposed.
If you encourage governments to register “requests to veto” based  
on _their own_ national law, you are telling them that they can,  
possibly, give their own local laws global effects using ICANN as  
their instrument. That’s wrong. It doesn’t matter whether the bar  
is high or low, it’s completely contrary to any notion of bounded,  
legitimate rule by governments who are accountable to and  
representative of their own people. Neither the government nor the  
people of country A have the right to dictate what the people of  
country B cannot do. No regulation without representation. Further,  
this leads to a rash of contradictory claims – as I have had to say  
again and again, in many cases it will be illegal in one  
jurisdiction not to suppress something and illegal to suppress it  
in another.
We have, I think, now revealed as false the claim that “individual  
government objections” are just a way to give governments (those  
poor, helpless, unrepresented things) a “hearing”. This is not  
about “hearing,” it’s about “doing.”
--MM






IP JUSTICE
Robin Gross, Executive Director
1192 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA  94117  USA
p: +1-415-553-6261    f: +1-415-462-6451
w: http://www.ipjustice.org     e: robin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx





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