[soac-mapo] Some comments about MAPO

[Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond <ocl@xxxxxxx>]

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