proposed statement on domain abuse and content regulation

[Mueller, Milton L]

Dear NCSG members:

In the next email I will send a proposed statement about domain abuse. Those of you involved with NCUC will recognize it, it has been circulated on the NCUC list and discussed extensively there.
We would also like to get the endorsement of NCSG as a whole for this statement. So I send it to the NCSG list for you to review.

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Proposed statement on domain abuse and content regulation


As civil society stakeholders concerned about individual rights and freedom of expression on the Internet, we think it is important to maintain a clear distinction between illegal content and domain name abuse. We wish to clarify and reaffirm ICANN's limited mission.

Domain abuse involves cases in which the domain itself is causing problems, such as domains that facilitate fraud and exploit confusion, support phishing via confusing or deceptive strings, or domains that support botnet command and control operations.

We are concerned that the concept of "domain abuse" is being stretched to include various forms of allegedly "illegal" or "undesirable" content on webpages, listservs and email addresses associated with domain names. This includes the use of domain names for political speech, personal expression and competitive discussions. An overly-broad definition of "domain abuse" would require ICANN to enter the realm of decision-maker or judge on whether the webpage was a copyright-infringement or fair use, involved legal use of a trademark to criticize a company's products or practices or trademark infringement, and whether hate speech, whose definition and legal status varies from country to country, was legitimate or not.

We believe that content that is allegedly illegal or objectionable is not "domain abuse" and is best addressed through other, well-established legal and regulatory methods, or through cooperative and self-regulatory action by Internet service providers. Neither ICANN nor its contracted parties should try to make DNS policy become the nexus for global content regulation.

We remind all participants that ICANN's mission, as defined in Section 1.1.(a)(i) of its bylaws, is narrowly confined to policies "for which uniform or coordinated resolution is reasonably necessary to facilitate the openness, interoperability, resilience, security and/or stability of the DNS." That clearly does not include content regulation. Moreover, the bylaws contain a specific prohibition on regulating "services that use the Internet's unique identifiers or the content that such services carry or provide, outside the express scope of Section 1.1(a)."

Expansion of ICANN's mission into content regulation will further politicize ICANN, and overload DNS policy with extraneous concerns that threaten the openness and interoperability of the DNS.

Accordingly, we call upon the ICANN board and all ICANN policy processes to adopt a precise and narrow definition of domain abuse, one that is consistent with ICANN's limited mission.



Dr. Milton L. Mueller
Professor, School of Public Policy
Georgia Institute of Technology


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