- ICANN President Stuart Lynn proposes placing DNS registration in international government hands.
- EFF and Four Leading Law School Clinics launch a new watchdog site to prevent abridgment of freedoms to choose domain names.
Unease with equality and accessibility abound in these jittery post-9-11 days, and nowhere is that discomfort so clearly felt as in cyberspace. In times of national crisis and global instability, the messy wheels of democracy, bogged down by due process and the deliberations that come with freedoms, leave citizens yearning for a safer, more orderly system. There's little patience for the chaos attendant upon democratic procedures and institutions. When popular, political, and legal sentiment all favor quick, clean, and efficient solutions to attain safety and security, the delay-prone democratic procedures and policies that preserve equal access and individual expression find few champions.
Stuart Lynn, president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN"), may well have been influenced by the current zeitgeist when he proposed a major overhaul of ICANN which would transfer control of the private corporation from private individuals into the hands of multiple governments, whether representative or not. ICANN, a private non-profit California corporation established in 1998, is responsible for assigning the domain name systems ("DNS") which make it possible to access internet resources. Lynn declares that ICANN is overburdened with procedural hurdles and currently can get nothing done. ICANN developed the internet's own form of alternative dispute resolution, the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy ("UDRP"). The UDRP is a controversial on-line procedure that resolves disputes over domain names and intellectual property infringements. Neither a court nor an arbitration, the UDRP has drawn criticism from all sides and is past due for a scheduled review. Trademark and copyright holders say the UDRP doesn't go far enough, and free speech advocates say it goes too far. Indeed, the overdue review of UDRP is the only ICANN duty which Lynn was able to identify specifically of the myriad procedural woes and burdens under which ICANN is supposedly sinking. See http://www.icann.org/ and http://www.icannwatch.org/ for the implementation status of the reorganization.
There are concerns from scholars and other directors on the ICANN board that Lynn's plan will "close the door" on the public, and give non-democratic, even totalitarian, governments influence over the internet and the U.S. in its virtual incarnation. In fact, under the California Corporations Code §35000 et seq., a corporation whose policies are determined by or at the suggestion of a foreign government are deemed to be subversive organizations. In these criticisms we find fears of both terrorist infiltrations into U.S. cyberspace and of infringements on the rights of individuals who rely on the free exercise of their right to express themselves in cyberspace through the creation of critical, satirical, and personal domains.
Lynn, of course, is not the only president who is being affected by the climate of the times. Every day new reports stream of federal and state government removal of formerly public information from websites, most recently, New York on Tuesday, February 26, 2002.
It is all the more notable, then, that at a time when the free flow of information is increasingly dammed up and the tendency to relinquish individual autonomy and private control of the internet to governments, democratic or otherwise, that the Electronic Frontier Foundation ("EFF") and four leading law school clinics - Harvard, Stanford, Boalt Hall at the University of California at Berkeley, and Hastings at the University of California in San Francisco - should launch http://www.chillingeffects.org/
The site is a brand new watchdog designed to help participants in online activities to understand the legal protections given to them by IP law and the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As of now, the principal activity of chillingeffects.org is to serve as an online clearinghouse for domain name cease-and-desist letters, which students at the clinics review and annotate, and link key phrases of the letters to the pertinent laws. The objective is to create a counter-chill, to generate a chilling effect of its own on the understandably but perhaps overly protective corporations and copyright-holders who have mounted too ferocious an attack upon small-time parodists, critics, and even inadvertent users of allegedly protected domain names. Although it runs counter to the prevailing rights freeze, the overall objective of chillingeffects.org is also to promote security, by ensuring the enduring freedom of democratic rights of free expression. It aims to encourage that unwieldy process of democratization in all its mess and inefficency, in part by shaming larger companies for using the most powerful weapons of litigation to stifle dissent, differences and perceived threats by suspect upstarts. In troubled times, it is a characteristically jittery, and perhaps understandable, reaction for the most powerful giants to use the biggest stick to swat at the smallest flies. http://www.chillingeffects.org aims to soften undue blows in the midst of widespread and not entirely unjustified panic.
