[I think Milton wrote this before seeing the Bush administation's letter, based only on the GAC letter posted earlier (http://www.icann.org/correspondence/tarmizi-to-board-12aug05.htm). I'd imagine it would be even more pointed now. --Declan] -------- Original Message -------- Subject: ICANN GAC letter on .xxx Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 23:36:54 -0400 From: Milton Mueller <mueller@private> To: declan Declan: The screed below is all I have to say on the subject. Posted on ICANNWatch but I hope you can post to your list. ===== For those of you who hate ICANN, the flap over the "recall" of the .xxx domain ought to give you an idea of how much worse the alternative is. And will be. You've got to know something is terribly wrong with governments - with governments as governments - when Brazil, France and the Bush administration agree on something this silly and arbitrary. And agree they did. They agreed to turn the Internet's domain name administration into a political football and milk it for all the political capital they could, without giving the public the tiniest benefit. They agreed that, five years after the idea of a .xxx domain was first proposed, we needed "more time" to consider it. Just as ICANN seemed to be bringing some rationality and impartiality into its selection of top level domains, they agreed to trash all pretense of having a defined process and objective criteria and turn it all into a game of behind-the-scenes pull and last-minute reversals based on arbitrary assertions of power. This situation requires the skills of a professional satirist, not those of a leaden-prosed academic like me. But let me do my best, because no one else seems to appreciate how mind-numbingly stupid the politics around ICANN and Internet governance have become. Let's begin with a big "Thank you!" to the government of Brazil. For more than a year you and other developing countries inspired us with your principled stance on the need for legitimacy and the need for governments, as "representatives of the people" to assert their proper role in the formation of Internet policy. And now you've shown us exactly how you'd use that power if you got it. And boy, aren't we excited!! I bet every sober-minded, moral person in the world is thrilled to know that we will purge the Internet of pornography by stopping the creation of an .xxx domain. Until now, I confess, I did not properly understand that there wasn't any porn on the Internet until ICM Registry proposed an .xxx domain. Now, however, it is clear to me that if we stop this domain, we will be striking a powerful blow against online filth -- won't we? If we refuse to publicly recognize that there is pornography on the Internet it won't exist, will it? Gosh, why didn't we think of this before? Before now, the problem of global censorship seemed so....hard! It's such a relief to know that all we have to do is smash some convenient symbolic scapegoat and tell an ignorant public how effectively we are addressing their concerns. (Incidentally, if we smash .xxx I presume that the next time I visit Rio I can walk two blocks to my hotel without encountering 27 semi-nude prostitutes?) Thank you so much, government of Brazil, for your pioneering efforts and creative policy proposals. I now understand why governments have to be involved in public policy. Without democratically elected governments, there would be no one to properly exploit these meaningless symbolic gestures. And thank you too, Government of France. You've appointed some of the highest ranking diplomats in the world to handle the Internet governance issue. Obviously, they are so high-level that they cannot be bothered with the details of actual Internet governance. No, why should anyone expect your representatives on the GAC to actually understand and follow ICANN's TLD processes over a five year period? You are much too important for that. When governments demand authority then mean just what they say -- they want authority, they don't want to actually do any work. Reading RFPs and calls for public comment -- what a dreadful bore! It is much wiser, is it not, to sit back and let ICANN make a decision, and then, only then, bring your keen minds into play, carefully weighing the decision that has already been made and deciding, forcefully like the closing of a steel trap: "No! We do not like it!" Don't worry your high-minded selves about the people who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars carefully following the Request for Proposals that was put before them, do not bother yourselves about the hours of evaluation and discussion that went into it. These things are trivial. Like the government of Brazil and the US, you know a good political target when you see it. Ah, but when it comes to the government of the United States of America, one can only speak in hushed tones of admiration at the onion-like layers of hypocrisy that envelop the .xxx recall. Let's start with the fact that the GAC letter would never have been sent if the US Government hadn't agreed to let it be sent. And even if it somehow had been sent, it NEVER would have been put on the front page of the ICANN website unless there had been....shall we say..."arrangements" made, nods given, between ICANN staff, key board members and US government officials. So thank you, USG, for standing up for your principles of "avoiding overly prescriptive or burdensome regulation" and "private sector leadership." And thank you for demonstrating what securing "Internet stability" really means. What could be more secure and stable than a decision process that consumes several million dollars and five years and then gets reversed at the last minute by a body that, according to ICANN by-laws, has no authority to initiate such a recall? How innocent and callow of me to think that stability had something to do with well-defined rules and procedures! I did not understand, but now I do: it is Your strength, Oh Bush, your awesome power itself that guarantees stability -- and what can better demonstrate that power than a refusal to be bound by the lilliputian threads of rules and procedure? Only in the USA can we speak of privatizing the domain name system and still reserve - to our own government exclusively - the power to choose the "private" administrators of DNS and to intervene at will in its decisions. Only in the USA can we somehow get away with publicly exploiting fears of censorship by China to defend our monopoly on ICANN and then, at the first real test, use that power to censor the global domain name system, openly catering to a domestic political constituency. Only in the USA can the conservative Right criticize ICANN in one year for NOT creating .xxx, and then mobilize against ICANN in another year for creating it. And despite all this, the entire country is still populated with people who bleat, like a herd of sheep, "who cares if the US has unilateral control of the DNS root, the US is a benign power that doesn't interfere with things. US good, UN bad...US good UN baaaaaad." The gap, the chasm, that separates the whole rationale for ICANN's creation and the actual practice of ICANNism by the US government is becoming so wide that several continents could fall into it and no one would notice. The bottom line is that we privatized and internationalized DNS administration precisely because we knew this kind of nonsense would happen if governments got their hands on it. What we are learning now is that even the USG, which created the whole bloody mess and holds it by the short hairs, is unwilling to abide by its decisions if the Christian Coalition makes enough noise. A better proof of the original hypothesis could scarcely be found. Dr. Milton Mueller Syracuse University School of Information Studies http://www.digital-convergence.org http://www.internetgovernance.org ----- End forwarded message ----- _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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