RE: [soac-mapo] charter and mission

[Milton L Mueller <mueller@xxxxxxx>]

Mary,
Your comments about the distinction between public and private international 
law are very useful and important. Thanks for making them. On the last point 
you added, I think we can easily get confused by the way you framed the 
question.
 (ancillary questions might include - what is the technical risk of a 
fragmented Internet caused by national governments exercising their sovereign 
rights to block certain sites/strings? What is ICANN's legal liability/exposure 
with/without a MAPO objection process? etc.)

In technical circles, a "fragmented internet" tends to imply a protocol 
incompatibility, which implies an actual inability of one network to reach 
another - even when it _wants_ to reach the other. For example, if we had two 
or more uncoordinated ip address registries, you might be unable to communicate 
with someone in Europe due to address collisions.

Blocking sites or strings, on the other hand, is a voluntary act a network 
operator might take that occurs thousands of times a day for thousands of 
different reasons. For example, ISPs routinely block IP addresses or ports 
associated with spam or botnets, end user systems routinely install filters to 
block certain kinds of content. That is not a "fragmented internet" that is 
just the way people manage their exposure to the internet.

Free expression advocates such as myself may disapprove of most of this 
blocking, especially when it is done by states and involuntarily imposed on 
companies and citizens. However, if they have the power to do it, they will do 
it, and we can't change it through ICANN policy. We can only change it via 
domestic advocacy within that country. In other words, the issue of blocking is 
orthogonal to the issue of what TLDs are globally created.

More importantly, there is an obvious logical contradiction in the idea that 
TLDs should be filtered and blocked by ICANN so as to avoid blocking of 
specific TLDs by individual states. This doesn't avoid blocking, it simply 
shifts the site of it to the global level, and imposes the lowest common 
denominator standard on the whole world.

Imagine if we did that for web site content. Supposed that we said, "China 
blocks millions of web sites, and we don't think that's good because it leads 
to a 'fragmented internet.' So we are going to make all the world's web sites 
submit their content to a central vetting authority who will eliminate any 
content that China or some other country might block." Such a policy would 
obviously be foolish. It would end up blocking and fragmenting MORE content 
than simply letting everyone publish and letting each individual state respond 
by blocking what they don't like.

So please don't imply that if ICANN blocks TLDs it is somehow avoiding 
blocking. Insofar as ICANN tries to anticipate what TLDs will be blocked by 
individual states, it is actually enlarging the scope of blocking tremendously.

--MM