NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: ICANN Asked to Remake the Internet in Joseph Smith's Image?
The CP80 effort sure sounds like the .xxx TLD effort to me!
I used to support the notion that there may actually be a legitimate ICANN
role in providing a port, convention or a TLD or some other means that would
help parents and private companies easily and voluntarily filter material
that is objectionable. Recently, the planned TLD of .xxx which would have
done the trick was cancelled thanks to the heavy influence of *both *the
religiously-based Family Research Council (FRC) *and *adult website owners.
Without asking, I'd bet that the FRC felt it would encourage the growth and
breadth of Internet porn, creating an "anything goes" red-light district
allowing more perverted porn than currently exists out there.
And probably the web site owners felt that it would open the door to more
censorship without any way for them to fight back -- if countries or ISPs
interfered with .xxx-identified sites, users might be too embarassed to
complain about it.
Even ICANN was probably feeling the heat -- I know that the lobbying went
over their head to the U.S. Commerce department. ICANN went from having
already approved the plan to withdrawing it, explaining that fights over
porn were not the kinds of fights they were the least bit interested in
debating.
The losers in all of this are *the exploited children* -- no, not kids found
on anyone's hard drive or kids running across porn while surfing disney.com,
but children being used as an excuse for adults to get the power to decide
what content other adults may access.
ICANN really can't afford to get bogged down deciding Supreme-Court-like
I-know-it-when-I-see-it cases. But the real reason to kill this idea is
the reason that ICANN decided to kill .xxx in 2006 (and again in 2007):
these aren't productive arguments being made on the religious side, they're
hidden agendas. Nobody is trying to save the children here, they're already
taken care of. Standards like W3C's PICS, Windows Parental Controls, and
many other 3rd-party filtering systems already exist to keep the kiddies out
of the porn: they just don't curb an adult's access.
Does anyone know if a study has been done to measure how many adult web
sites voluntarily encode their sites or register with child-filtering
software vendors?
Robb Topolski
[ I've always been strongly opposed to creation of a dot-ex-ex-ex
TLD, or other mandated Internet "controversial content
channelization" efforts. They won't provide the "protection"
that their proponents suggest, and they are letting the camel
way under the tent in terms of censorship. Australia at this
very moment is rapidly becoming the non-Communist world's poster
child for a mandated filtering and censorship nightmare.
-- Lauren Weinstein
NNSquad Moderator ]
On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> ICANN Asked to Remake the Internet in Joseph Smith's Image?
>
> http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000522.html
>
>
> Greetings. If there's one thing that scares the bejabbers out of me,
> it's when organized religion -- either directly or via proxies --
> attempts to nose its way into technology policy issues.
>
> It appears that such a scenario is unfolding currently, with a
> concerted new effort to fundamentally remake the Internet in a manner
> befitting the sensibilities of top-down religious hierarchies. An
> Internet Pope? The Spanish Inquisition? Not exactly -- that's the
> incorrect religion for this particular case.
>
> "The Register" connects the dots of a rather sordid sequence of events
> in an article posted today
> ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/18/mormons_icann/ ).
>
> Executive summary: It appears that mainly Utah-based Mormon anti-porn
> crusaders, in league with Ralph J. Yarro III (SCO Group chairman) have
> combined forces to petition ICANN toward the creation of a new
> "Cybersafety Constituency" -- and are now reportedly using form
> letters to dominate the brief period of time available for comments
> ( http://www.icann.org/en/public-comment/#cybersafety ).
>
> To better understand how this all comes together and what such a
> Cybersafety Constituency might be after, one must be aware that Cheryl
> Preston, a key player for CP80 (headed by Yarro) is spearheading this
> effort ( http://www.cp80.org ).
>
> CP80, which has been around for a number of years, has been pushing a
> radical and impractical (decorum prevents me from saying "loony" at
> this juncture) plan for fundamental restructuring of Internet
> architecture, along with associated new laws, to "channelize" the
> Internet into the censorship advocates' dream machine. These are
> hard-core Internet content control zealots we're talking about, at
> least judging from their own materials.
>
> CP80 says that a whole slew of big name corporations, including Apple,
> Toshiba, Wal-Mart, Sony, PetSmart, Office Depot, and on and on, are
> "contribution partners" to their effort -- seeming to imply support for
> the CP80 agenda ( http://www.cp80.org/getinvolved/sponsors ). In
> reality, it appears likely to me that these are merely purchase
> affiliation links, and I wonder how many of these firms are aware of
> the manner in which CP80 is using their names and logos.
>
> While it's difficult to visualize CP80's radical agenda gaining much
> traction in the short term, their entanglement with the new ICANN
> petition and what appears to be a well orchestrated Mormon pressure
> campaign certainly rate a "yellow shading toward orange" alert.
>
> To be exceptionally clear about this, the key issue here isn't the
> particular religion involved. I'd say exactly the same thing about
> any other organized religion that appeared to be involving
> itself -- in my view -- inappropriately in technology policy matters.
>
> Unfortunately, history teaches us that organized religion (a concept
> that I've always considered to be utterly orthogonal to truly
> meaningful questions of God, gods, and spirituality in general) is all
> too often an instrument for societal control rather than
> enlightenment.
>
> I consider it crucial that the Internet not be sucked into this
> particular maelstrom.
>
> --Lauren--
> Lauren Weinstein
> lauren@vortex.com
> Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
> http://www.pfir.org/lauren
> Co-Founder <http://www.pfir.org/lauren%0ACo-Founder>, PFIR
> - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
> Co-Founder, NNSquad
> - Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.org
> Founder, GCTIP - Global Coalition
> for Transparent Internet Performance - http://www.gctip.org
> Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
> Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
> Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
>
>
--
Robb Topolski (robb@funchords.com)
Hillsboro, Oregon USA
503-407-4499
http://www.funchords.com/