Non-Roman Country-Code Domains Could Fuel Repression, .ORG Registry Chief Warns
Creation of internationalized country-code domains could fuel repression of Internet users, Public Interest Registry (.org) CEO Alexa Raad said this week. A worldwide rise in nationalism and a lack of checks on how governments use internationalized domain names (IDNs) could fragment the Net and increase state control of end-users, Raad wrote Tuesday on CircleID, a Web site that tracks Internet infrastructure issues. ICANN is moving toward a process for fast-tracking a limited number of “non-contentious” IDNs (domains in non- Roman script) in country-code top level domains (ccTLDs). But Raad and others said individual users have been left out.
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Raad first expressed her views to ICANN President Paul Twomey. She and ICANN Non-Commercial Users Constituency Chairman Milton Mueller said in an Aug. 6 letter that use of IDNs should be seen as a means of allowing multilingual use of the Internet, “not used as a tool by governments to control access, impose censorship or limit freedom of expression online.” They urged ICANN to distinguish carefully the “true needs of Internet users from the interest of those who might claim to represent them politically.”
If ICANN considers only a government’s claim for specific IDN needs, Raad and Milton wrote, officials may be able to impose specific language or script restrictions that prevent access by users. Governments also could enact laws or pricing policies limiting end-user accessibility to Internet content outside a specific IDN, they said.
IDNs might also be used to fragment the domain name system (DNS), the authors wrote. They urged ICANN to verify that any new IDN ccTLD’s operator is “fully committed and legal bound to maintaining” an interoperable and globally accessible Internet, and to ensure that criteria are set to prevent domain name registries from setting burdensome political or economic restrictions on users.
“Disturbing trends” are emerging in geographic and linguistic nationalism and technical advances enabling censorship and filtering, Raad said on CircleID. The very governments often cited for repressive controls are the ones demanding their own internationalized TLDs, she said. They have been able to clamp down on traditional media but online content is harder to filter if they don’t control the entity running the Web site, she said: “It is one thing to burn the books one by one, but another to control the distribution plant.”
The Internet community shows little interest in questioning the process, Raad said, but it must consider the rights and needs of end-users in IDNs. The question of “is this right for the welfare of the internet user?” must be asked, she wrote.
The trend seems to be to give priority to IDN ccTLDs, which could lead to more government control given the lack of internationalized generic TLDs (gTLDs), said Bertrand de La Chapelle, vice chairman of the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee and France’s special envoy for the information society. There is interest in creating a few open IDN gTLDs not the responsibility of their corresponding governments, de La Chapelle said. Whether they take the form of the equivalent of .com., .org or other gTLDs, or linguistic versions such as .greek in Greek or .chinese in Chinese, is an open question, but the debate is worthwhile, he said.
Debate should address all points of interest, de La Chapelle said, specifically: (1) How to articulate and balance IDN ccTLDs and gTLDs, and whether to introduce them simultaneously. (2) The registration policies for IDN ccTLDs and the legal foundation for any restrictions they impose. (3) How to distribute the responsibilities for managing the multi-script domain name system by “script communities” and, within each, between governments and nongovernmental bodies.
Script communities probably will shape control of the multiscript DNS, de La Chapelle said. Each community will have a say in the operation of the TLDs in its corresponding script, a role like that played by the U.S. and Europe in managing the Roman DNS, he said.
How script communities will be organized, and what role governments will have in running the corresponding part of the DNS, is unclear, de La Chapelle said. There’s no reason for the multiscript DNS to be handled just as the Roman DNS has been, he said. The main challenge is to limit the risk of abusive controls while allowing script communities to take local responsibility, all within a global, interoperable framework, he said.
ICANN’s IDN policy guidelines can’t be enforced solely through Internet governance but need diplomatic support as well, said Institute for the Future Senior Researcher Mike Liebhold. He questioned whether anyone in U.S. government is willing or able to take on enforcement of non-ASCII DNS policies. Without strong policy safeguards, there is a risk of state control of ccTLD IDNs, he said.
IDN TLDs should wait until fundamental Internet engineering problems are fixed, Liebhold said. ICANN is trying to create non-ASCII TLDs at the same time as it makes way for many new gTLDs, Internet Protocol (IP) version 4 addresses are running out and uptake of IPv6 names is slow, and the entire DNS needs re-engineering, he said. He cited the “Kaminsky flaw,” a serious problem with the way domain name servers authenticate translations from domain name to an IP address.