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Re: [ga] no problem with www.nukeisrael.com

Danny -

It was Tucows' CEO's job to act as a human being with conscience and courage - and I'm glad he did. It was not the company's job. In doing so, he took on liability - and bless him for that.

We do need more people with moral courage - and I believe we need a much more diferentiated, competition-on-the-basis-of-service-rather-than-price domain-name market.. But I don;t want registrars drafted as police for governments we may not like or trust.

The courage of some individuals to act honorably is a different matter entirely.

Esther

At 09:41 AM 3/12/2006, Danny Younger wrote: 
Esther wrote:  "it is *not* Tucows' job to be moral
police or vigilantes".

I'd like to talk about this proposition.

Recently I was contacted by a rape crisis center whose
domain name had expired.  Upon expiration their domain
had been snatched by a domain name monetizer that
(1)copied their former website using a search engine
cache in order to maintain an ongoing high level of
traffic, and (2) added large numbers of pornographic
links to their former website.

While one could argue that no one has the job of being
a moral policeman (let alone an innocent ISP/registrar
that did nothing more than allow a registration to be
processed), this particular case demonstrated just how
easy it is to use the domain name system to further
victimize those that have already been traumatized by
sexual violence.

What happened in this case (mostly due to automated
processes used by domain name monetizers that generate
links based on domain name semantic associations) was
a tragic example of the deleterious effects that
automated domain name monetization can impose.

In this case, the registrar wasn't under any legal
obligation to do anything (in fact, any action would
necessarily have been on shaky legal grounds), but in
a rare display of compassion the registrar did in fact
take measures to address the situation by locking the
domain.

I believe that there are times when we do need to act
as moral policemen.  There are, in fact, certain
behaviors that are universally recognized as offensive
or repugnant.  If a domain name advocates genocide,
then I believe that we have a civil obligation to have
it shut down.

If we can use appendix X in a registry contract to
reserve names such as dotprosucks, then we can
certainly, as a matter of policy, declare that all
domain names that promote genocide are excluded from
registration by default.



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Esther Dyson              Always make new mistakes!
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