It seems politics is rearing its ugly head in what should be a no-political process.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070227-8928.htmlAn ICANN group called the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) is currently drafting new rules to cover the creation of generic TLDs, which currently include .edu, .com, and .net. In their draft report on the matter, the GNSO sought to head off problems by laying down rules to prevent confusingly similar TLDs, along with any character string that might cause "technical instability." In addition, they decided that "strings [of characters in the TLD name] should not be contrary to public policy."
That's a broad restriction, and a vague one. To find out what it means, you need to look to another ICANN group, the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC). GAC has issued its own guidance on what "contrary to public policy" means, and hatred, and racism, discrimination, crime, and abuse of religion are out of bounds—as decided by ICANN staff. Defining these terms is a messy business, of course, and one person's "abuse of religion" might be another's "truth-telling." GAC provides no guidance on the use of these terms
The new proposal "would essentially make ICANN the arbiter of public policy and morality in the new gTLD space, a frightening prospect for anyone who cares about democracy and free expression," says Robin Gross, the executive director of IP Justice. Gross is a member of ICANN's Non-Commerical Users Constituency (NCUC), and she is promoting an alternate plan that gets rid of the current "contrary to public policy" language. Instead, her proposal is that "the string should not be illegal in the country in which it is registered," which means that national law would be used by each country to determine if a particular TLD should be allowed there. This would remove ICANN staff from the equation.
Icann is supposed to be an neutral and impartial body, this seems to overstep the mark in terms of what they are authorised to do with global concent, they may find themselves in another bad publicity fiasco if they press ahead with this politicisation of the web.
