> On Wed, 12 Jan 2011, Nicolas Adam wrote:

> > By the way, peadophilia is not the issue. It is totally separate. Peadophilia 
> > is a crime everywhere (i hope). Porn isn't. And they are not the same neither 
> > from a moral point of view, nor is peadophilia simply an extension of porn or 
> > porn with a different degree: they are two different kinds of phenomenon.
Ron Wickersham replied:
> may i point out that there is no legal mechanism to ensure that a tld 
> (for example) .peadophilia contains material appealing to peadophiles.
> 
> on the other hand, an organization _opposed_ to peadophilia could well
> create the registy for .peadophilia and the local organizations in 
> countries worldwide could take second-level domains under that reigstry.
> 
> you cannot force them to only consider making a choice of "obvious"
> reference to the content of the tld by saying they would have to choose
> .anti-peadophilia, for instance.
> 
> currently while .com has no regulation of the content of second-level
> domains, and most .com sites involve companies that are in favor of
> commerce, there are second-level domains concerned with regulation of
> commerce, so are .anti-com in nature as well as sld's that propogage
> information against specific companies.
> 
> would creating a tld .breastcancer mean that all the content there is
> advocating more people contract breast cancer, or should they be reqired
> to use .anti-breastcancer?
> 
> any suggestion that content would _by icann policy_ be restricted to
> one classification for all new tlds i don't believe would find wide
> support at the end of the day.
> 
> it retroactively impose classification on internet content could be
> done by creating a zero-th level domain extension required for all
> current tlds with definitions and enforcemnt by a super-bureaucracy,
> which would be very contentious, indeed.   can you imagine such things
> as the International Federation Red Cross instead of being 
> http://www.ifrc.org would be forced to change to http://www.ifrc.org.charity?
> and what of sites like wikipedia which has information in all catagories,
> including cancer, sexuality, and terrorism?
> 
> 
> i support the position that icann should not impose (or attempt to impose)
> content restricted to definitions of the string of characters that become
> new tlds.   (what the creators of each new registry choose to limit the
> registrants under their new tld is up to them, such as the examples of
> .aero or .museum)

Ron,

Usually I would cut down a message of this length in reply, but this is all 
worth leaving in, I think. I'm persuaded by your argument that any tld string 
could be used in many ways but further consideration needs to be given to 
what this means in practice. Having been persuaded by Ron that .paedophilia 
or .paedophile even should not be considered beyond the pale as a string, 
should then ICANN attempt to exert any a-priori control over the issue on a 
semantic level or should it only ever work on the syntactic/technical level. 
This seems to me to be at the heart of many of the debates we're going 
through at the moment, and it would help to have a discussion in NCSG-NCUC 
about where we generally stand on this issue.

Related issues that I think come up on this are (not exhaustively):

new TLDs
trademarks and dispute resolution 
country codes
internationalisation



-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      [log in to unmask]
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/