New Domain Names May Aid State Censorship
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - the organization that licenses domains like .com and .edu - meets in Paris this week to discuss two proposals which could change the shape of the Internet. The first would create a new class of non-latin alphabet domains - Cyrillic and Chinese, for example - while the second would create a potentially infinite number of 'generic' domains - .museum, for example, or .africa. (See [here] for a post on the second proposal.) The first proposal includes potential censorship concerns, which are discussed below.
The new proposal considers adding non-latin country names - the Chinese character translation of .cn, for example, and the Cyrillic translation of .ru - and if approved would cede management of those domains to their countries' respective governments. The Chinese government already operates .cn and the Russian government operates .ru, and both countries have repeatedly censored material within these domains. Last year Russia censored the popular website Lenta.ru for criticizing Uzbek elections, and this year Russian lawmakers proposed censoring any online material the government deemed "extremist". China has a long history of censoring websites related to the Falun Gong and Tiananmen Square, and continues to censor politically sensitive sites in the run-up to the Olympic games.
In the face of ongoing censorship, ICANN could do two things to aid free speech in these countries. First, it could require an 'open access' provision for these new non-latin domains. That is, it could require that any person who wanted to buy a specific site within the Cyrillic or Chinese domains (www.falungong.cn, for example) could do so, regardless of his or her politics. Second, ICANN could relax registration requirements for purchasing new domain names. For example, it could strike its own requirements that buyers give their addresses or contact information, or it could mandate people be allowed to purchase domain names under pseudonyms (provided, or course, that the buyers actually paid their bills). In this way governments would have a much harder time controlling end-user content.
The current proposal for non-latin domains does neither of these things. After all, ICANN considers itself a technical body, not a political one. And even if ICANN were to impose these sorts of requirements, a government could try to create its own top-level domains, and provide its own registry services, ostensibly making a separate Internet. Yet even if ICANN's influence on the Chinese (or any) government is small, it remains the best-placed organization to make just such a demand for free speech.
You can track the debate in Paris here and here; a decision on the non-Latin domains is expected this week.
