By now, everyone in the industry already know about the .XXX fiasco. If you don’t, here is a quick summary.
– ICANN approved the .XXX delegation to ICMRegistry on 1st June. ICMRegistry announced it will be operational on 16th August.
– Michael Gallagher requested Vint Cerf to delay .XXX delegation on 11th August. Michael Gallagher is the Assistant Secretary to DoC and NITA appointed by Bush.
– Chairman of GAC, Sharil requested ICANN to delay .XXX delegation on 12th August.
– Bush administration scored some brownie points with Pro-Family Group (dated 17th August).
Milton Mueller’s thoughts is also a must read although I am not so certain David Sampson is the invisible-hand behind the fiasco. IMHO, the Bush administration is generally right-wing so with or without Sampson involvement, they probably do what they did anyway.
But the fiasco left me thinking over a few questions:
1. How could a single government unilaterally halt a decision made by an international community? I know ICANN isn’t exactly independent yet but would you expect Tony Blair to be able to do what Bush did?
Unfortunately, ICANN is in this lose-lose position.
If they decide to go ahead with the .XXX delegation (technically they couldn’t anyway without the sign-off by DoC) or they condamn Bush administration over this, they would risk a fallout with US DoC. That’s not a good thing right now given ICANN is trying very hard to demostrate to DoC that they should be independent.
If they decided to halt .XXX delegation (which they did), then the message they send to the international community is never doubt US is ultimately incharge of the DNS, all the TLDs including the ccTLDs that many considered a souvernity right. This will give a lot of ammunitions to those who wish the control of the DNS to be transferred to UN or ITU and at the very least, swing some who is on the fense in this tug-of-war.
I pity ICANN and the losers are all those who believe in industry self-regulation of the DNS.2. Since when the delegations of TLD has become a political chip of lobbists? Are we setting a very dangerous precedence that Internet Governance isn’t about international collobration but just really horse-trading among the lobbists in Washington?
If so, why are we wasting time in ICANN? The industry, registries, registrars and also ccTLDs should start hiring their own lobbists in Washington now! (Actually, I think some of them already do.)
3. While Sharil claimed that there are several governments who also expressed concerned .XXX, no other has stepped forward yet. Who are the others? GAC could have expressed that red-flag in Luxembourg meeting in July but why only do so now one day after US statement? I am sure Sharil couldn’t issue the statement without the GAC consensus but I like to see more transparency in that front.
IMHO, there is a misunderstanding the intention of .XXX. ICMRegistry have said it wish to developed guidelines for its members so as to have a responsible industry. It also acknowledge the fact that by putting themselves under .XXX, they are also potentially subjecting themselves to being filtered en-masses – and they never object to that.
Unfortunately, the pro-family groups only heard the word “porn” and nothing else. To them, .XXX not only promotes porn but also encourage registrations of porn site and also making porns site easier to be found. Obviously they didn’t understand that DNS is not a search engine. (They are better off screaming at Google)
While I can understand their desire to get rid of all porn, one couldn’t close their eye and pretend porn don’t exists. It does and always will. In their short-sightedness, they failed to see that .XXX actually helps them in filtering porn.
The whole fiasco is not only a shooting their own foot, it is also a bombshell to the other innocent bystanders, ICANN and all those who wish to see successful industry self-regulation. *sigh*
