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Barbara Simons
- posted on 2000-10-01 21:26:18
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I am strongly opposed to censorship. A major problem is determining who decides what is appropriate and what is not. Is a web page that provides psychological support for teen-age homosexuals pornographic? What about one that discusses how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases? or a museum web site that contains pictures of nudes? or a medical web site that contains realistic depictions of the human body?
The best way to deal with kids and the Internet is for parents to supervise their children's interactions on the Internet. Parents also should teach their children how to return to the previous location if they find themselves at an inappropriate site - or, if necessary, to reboot the computer. Unsatisfactory as some people will find this approach, it provides more options than are given in a number of other situations, for example when traveling with children on airplanes that show violent, sexual, or sexist films.
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Donald Langenberg
- posted on 2000-10-01 20:14:41
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As an American, my attitude toward this set of questions is strongly conditioned by a life spent under the protection of our constitutional guarantee of free speech. That is, I personally wouldn't presume to control sexual content, or any other kind of content, on the Internet. And I don't think ICANN should try to do so either. I recognize that my right to free speech does have some limitations, defined over the years in various courts, but I believe those limitations ought to be as few as possible. Having said all that, I also recognize that most Internet users live where the U.S. constitution does not govern. What that may imply for future policies on Internet content is beyond my present knowledge.
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Harris Miller
- posted on 2000-09-29 12:02:03
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ICANN should stay away from attempting to be a net censor. It is also not clear how such a policy could be enforced in any event. Questions about sexual content are not properly before ICANN but before the appropriate government authority.
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Emerson Tiller, J.D., Ph.D.
- posted on 2000-09-28 18:37:28
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I think that ICANN should generally stay out of the business of regulating content (with perhaps child pornography being an exception). I think that if a TLD operator gets the TLD .kids and wants to limit content sites to child friendly material, ICANN should let the operator have that choice. But such conditions by a TLD operator should be stated up front when an operator requests a TLD.
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Lyman Chapin
- posted on 2000-09-28 18:23:20
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I don't believe that it is either possible or desirable to control content of any kind, including sexual content, by using restricted TLDs. We have no generally accepted standard for what constitutes sexual content, and certainly no generally accepted standard for what constitutes kid safe information, on which to base such a policy. I'm not against content filtering (I'm a parent), but I believe it should be individual (at the end user) rather than institutional (in the network).
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Lawrence Lessig
- posted on 2000-09-26 23:24:04
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It is not ICANN's role, in my view, to
regulate access to sexual content on the
net. That is a role for governments;
ICANN is not a government. It may well be
appropriate to establish a .xxx or .kinder
domain, but that alone will not solve any
problem of access. If content is to be
zoned into one area over another, that will
require the enforcement of regulations by
governments. But again, ICANN is no
government.
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Karl Auerbach
- posted on 2000-09-26 20:41:00
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(By-the-way, the Internet is more than the world wide web. And the DNS system is used for far more than URL's leading to web sites.)
But getting to your question - ICANN should not become a worldwide monitor of someone's notion of morality.
Let's not try to turn ICANN into Orwell's Big Brother.
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