Slashdot Mirror
NSI challenged over "obscene" domains
drwiii writes "news.com has a news tidbit about NSI going to court because of their refusal to register domain names that they feel are "obscene".
" What's amusing to me is the steady flow of words
that I hear about that are rejected, considering the
relative naughtiness of many existing domains.
As others have noted, the original rationalisation for the FCC's restriction on radio/TV speech was the limited broadcast spectrum available. Spectrum is a public good, and some regulation does make sense, particularly to ensure free public access rather than having it totally owned and dominated by large corporations appealing to the least common denominator. (This is a very republican notion, in keeping with the Constitution, which limits direct democracy on the same grounds.) Consider the decline in the quality of radio programming since the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996 loosened ownership restrictions and increased market concentration.
:-)
The problem we face as proponents of online freedom is that existing legal precedent cannot be easily applied to the Internet. It is funded partly by public money and partly by private money. Its organisation stretches analogies to other media beyond reasonable applicability. For example, bandwidth is in a sense limited, but as a user/listener/viewer-controlled medium that traffic is allocated by consumers, not producers. Moreover bandwidth is not permanently fixed by the laws of physics, but rather can be added on demand. It is an international medium. Hence the clear public interest in regulation does not pertain.
There is also a fundamental contradiction in NSI insisting that they are a private enterprise not subject to the same First Amendment standard as a government body, and in acting as a regulator like the FCC. Worse, by establishing themselves as a regulatory body, they've violated any pretense at common-carrier privileges and could be held liable in any number of interesting ways for domain names that others find offensive. Oops.
One might argue that NSI should be compelled to divest control of the root database into a non-profit organisation tasked with minimising the administrative costs of root service. No single organisation (even a nonprofit and especially a bureacracy) will ever have the incentive to actually attain this minimum, and yet the difficulty of maintaining multiple databases for the same TLD appears to make a market solution impossible. Perhaps a nonprofit root service funded by for-profit domain registrars, who would have an incentive to force down root server costs, is the best we can hope for.
Why is it that almost every week now I hear new alligations concerning NSI's policies. Why does NSI seem to think they are a completly independent buisness under the same regulations as any other buisness. I mean get real they are a government appointed monopoly, essentially a utility. Being a buisness gives you the right to essentially turn any customer away as long as you have a set legal policy and non descrimitory guidlines for doing so. But this is essentially a utility ladies and gentlemen. They have to follow federal government rules meaning.... The Contitution.. Just wish public schools did this hehe (grins at JonKatz)
Huddleston said that domain name was registered before the 1996 installation of the automated registration system. She said the name will be denied when it comes up for renewal.
So just how do they justify refusal to renew a domain that they have ALREADY registered. As the owner of several domains, I don't like the idea that NSI can pull the rug out from under them just because they *don't like them*.
I've been a domain admin for a few years (my InterNIC handle is just TDP... no numbers). I'm really beginning to miss The Good Old Days when politicians didn't even know the Internet existed, spam email was virtually unheard of, and InterNIC was not run by a bunch of assholes.
Thad
The Bolachek Journals