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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Although interesting, this is overshadowed by the growing politicisation of the internet.

ICANN seems to have a representative multi-government structure that is robust against any particular government having unreasonable influence. If a few Sundes get crushed in the gears so be it.

The US tech giants are beholden to themselves and control a scary fraction of the internet's infrastructure. They are starting to flex their muscles in regard to what should and should not appear on the internet. As far as political threats go, that is where they will materialise. Or in governments copying China's strategy for engaging with technology.

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Just because some other internet giant is screwing free speech harder doesn't make this any less wrong.

Battles can be fought on multiple fronts if necessary.

This isn't the first corruption coming from ICANN.

it's not FREE SPEECH, it's FREE POLITICAL SPEECH which is in fact an oxymoron as that cannot ever exist in an efficient society even if we want it to

The US first amendment protects all speech, not just political speech. Most particularly it protects offensive speech because that is the only kind that needs protecting. We endure many inefficiencies for the freedoms we allow, the idea is that those freedoms are worth the cost.

The US first amendment protects (almost) all speech, but only from prosecution by the government, not by companies.

Indeed, if the drafters had forseen corporatism many things might have been different. And then there is the organized persecution of peers for their horribly offensive (read differing) opinions that is allowed by our modern communication tools. Is freedom of speech freedom to persecute? Maybe having really bad ideas should become a protected class? I say that only half jokingly, I have no answers.

The drafters didn't foresee protected classes (in the legal sense you're using the term, if I understand correctly); in fact, several of those protected classes simply weren't granted the rights granted to white male landowners by the Constitution the drafters framed.

I don't know how much guidance we can take from the original drafters on the novel problems of the modern era.

Good question. And there is also the freedom of (dis)association.

Yes, and this really highlight the problem with ICANN: it's de-facto (global) government, except legally it isn't.

At what point do we stop calling a company a small profit-taking endeavor and start calling them a government in everything but name? When they have a monopoly over national communication infrastructure? When they control a small city complete with infrastructure just to service a Florida theme park? How about when they overthrow foreign governments to grow bananas easier?

Well some companies are starting to look more and more like the government. Besides corporations are protected by the government from certain things. The populace should be protected from their actions as well. Existence of big corporation always affects life of many people so it is only fair that those corps should be restricted in what their can do.

For one thing those corps main duty is to make money. If they engage in morality setting instead they should have their business license revoked.

So we don't have rights, but privileges.

Corruption from ICANN is 100x worse than big tech. ICANN can just tell DNS servers not to route anything to do with you and threaten others to do the same.

The strategy is different, and clear though. First monopolize contents, then censor. It seemed impossible to do in the web when it bloomed. Compared with tv, it was a difficult beast to tame. But free resources, convenience and having all your contacts captive work as a charm.

Why do you believe ICANN’s multi-government structure is somehow robust against any one government or small consortium of governments having too much power?

cough Is this the same ICANT that we all know and love :-)

Sorry forgot the <sarcasm> tag

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