Question: Is ICANN presently carrying out any kind of censorship? Is that censorship appropriate?

Nominee Replies

Lyman Chapin - posted on 2000-09-24 13:41:18 I have no reason to believe that ICANN is censoring this Q&A forum, in the sense of posting some questions or answers but not others. Clearly they have constrained the dialogue between candidates and members to a very narrow space, in which it is really only possible to ask a question and receive a reply; it's almost impossible to follow up with either discussion or further questions on the same topic. Karl Auerbach - posted on 2000-09-19 11:10:42 I have no idea whether ICANN is censoring any of this material in this Q&A. However, if they are, it is wrong. Censorship in any context is wrong. I do believe that individual shunning of those who go beyond socially acceptable dialog is, however, appropriate. See my position about censorship at http://www.cavebear.com/ialc/platform.htm#no-censorship Lawrence Lessig - posted on 2000-09-19 09:05:48 This is a great example of what I think is most interesting about cyberspace. This forum, in an important sense, is censoring discussion. I don't mean to attribute bad motives, but the fact that the questioner does not get a chance to follow up, and that the participants don't get a chance to ask clarifying questions, channels in an important way, how the debate proceeds. The very architecture of this forum then -- its code -- is constraining speech in an important way. I've opened another webpage that will, sometime today, be live with an open forum with a threaded discussion space. I encourage anyone to ask more questions there. See http://www.lessig.org Donald Langenberg - posted on 2000-09-19 04:50:43 I have no idea. Emerson Tiller, J.D., Ph.D. - posted on 2000-09-18 21:33:22 Yes, censorship is occurring in several ways. For example: 1. Decisions under the UDRP that force the transfer of protest domain names (such as walmartcanadasucks.com) or religious word domain names (such as corinthians.com) constitutes censorship. 2. The nonrefundable $50K TLD application fee is likely preventing certain forms of speech from emerging and, thus, constitutes censorship. 3. If ICANN screened some member questions from the candidates, or candidate answers from the membership, during this Q&A, that would be censorship (I have no evidence that this is happening). These types of censorship are generally inappropriate. I'm sure there are more.