[IP] Re: Nothing like prior constraint. No courts just NetSol!!! Internet company suspends politician's website over Qur'an film

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
From: dhc2@dcrocker.net [dhc2@dcrocker.net]
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2008 1:07 AM
To: Steve Crocker; David Farber; ip
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:    Nothing like prior constraint. No courts just NetSol!!! Internet company suspends politician's website over Qur'an film

A rare Crocker-vs-Crocker exchange for IP...


Steve,

> From: Steve Crocker [steve@shinkuro.com] Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2008 7:17 PM
>  Of course, protection of expression regarding the Qur'an is only one part of
> the overall equation.  Sale of Nazi memorabilia, child porn, phishing and
> other phenomena also draw attention and create calls for controlling content
> or finding out the identity of the purveyor. Your formula of limiting action
> unless it violates the laws of the home country doesn't address the issue of
> significant differences among countries.


ICANN imposes various administrative and operational requirements on gTLD
registries.  This includes a dispute resolution mechanism between a current
holder and a claimant. Note that this mechanism works in spite of the diversity
of trademark laws across the globe.

What seems to be missing is a similar, independent mechanism for dealing with
disputes between a holder and their registry, and especially one that limits the
ability of a registry from taking capricious action against a domain holder.

It appears that a registry can, in fact, be quite whimsical in blocking domain
name-based access to the organization via the web or email. That's a pretty
onerous power.

It is one thing to permit registries to have whatever AUP they wish, and quite
another to deprive domain holders from any protections to ensure reasonable
application of the AUP.

Independent of other formalities and niceties, it seems to me that ICANN should
place an affirmative requirement on registries to document their case for
removing access and that the case should be supplied to ICANN, or some other
third party, for review.  One could argue that there should independent prior
approval before the domain name can be turned off.

In other words, gTLD registries need to be accountable for depriving
organizations from the ability to serve their users.

d/

ps. This is a call to action for the ICANN community, not a complaint about
ICANN failure.  Making the sort of change I am suggesting will be neither quick
nor easy and, ultimately, ICANN can "impose" the requirement only in response to
community consensus.  That's fine.  Civil society participants in the ICANN
community should consider this something constructive to pursue...

--

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net


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