ICANN may be able to directly influence the content of various sites – the corporation has taken a step towards becoming the “content police” of the Internet, writes .RU/.РФ Coordination Center (CC) on Thursday.
ICANN could have such leverage if a proposal is passed whereby registries for new generic top-level domains would accept what are known as “Registry Voluntary Commitments” (RVCs). The need to comply with the RVC and liability for violations will be spelled out in the registries contract with ICANN org.
The proposal is contained in the Phase 2 Implementation Plan for the New Domains Program submitted to the ICANN Board earlier this week, the CC reports.
RVCs, the CC explains, have a lot in common with Public Interest Commitments (PIC), which were adopted by some registries in the first phase of the new domains program. PIC, in particular, provides for the refusal to provide domain names in the new first-level domain zones for pornographic sites or resources containing offensive content.
However, the major difference is that the PICs are purely voluntary commitments, and ICANN has no way to enforce them. Moreover, the corporation’s rules expressly state that it cannot control services that use the Internet’s unique identifier system and their content.
If a new proposal is approved, and an RVC compliance clause is included in the contract with ICANN, the corporation will have to revise these rules, taking control of the content of the sites.
Recallthat, according to a number of registries, ICANN is increasingly turning into a large corporate structure, suffering from dilution of its own goals and diversion of resources to secondary tasks.
Reference
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is a Californian company, a non-profit corporation whose task is to coordinate everything that is somehow connected with the management of the Internet address space. For example, the creation of domain names using non-Latin alphabets and the introduction of new top-level domains. Particularly important are the functions of the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), transferred ICANN from the US Department of Commerce in 2016. The functions of the IANA are to allocate ranges of IP addresses, including for country top-level domains such as .ru and .рф.
ICANN plays a critical role in the established system of Internet governance, which, in accordance with US National Cyber Strategy is not subject to change, since without the current “open Internet” “propaganda of the American way of life and state protection of the interests of American companies” are impossible.
