ICANN Is Not the Internet Content Police (2015) (opens in new tab)

It's refreshing to see an organisation act with restraint. It's easy to overstep authority by acting like a benevolent dictator, especially when people try and compress a complex topic down to "good vs bad", so it's great that not only recognise the complexity of the issue but refuse to act rashly.

This is bit of a self-inflicted problem for the internet (although not really ICANNs fault for once). ccTLDs would make is extremely clear what jurisdiction applies and where the authority is. I don't think anyone would dare to suggest that ICANN should suspend domains under ccTLDs. In contrast the gtlds we use do leave the door open for this debate to drag on, and because gtlds are run by private companies the whole discussion becomes more complicated.

ICANN (and more worryingly Let's Encrypt) is not going to be the content police only for as long as the US government allows them not to be the content police.

DNS is an open protocol. If they ever tried being the internet police, expect some "Freedom DNS" entity to form. Nothing would prevent users from switching over to get the uncensored version of the internet.

2015 precedes the election of Trump and the Brexit referendum, watershed moments when we started to really worry about the kinds of things we allow to proliferate online.

We have a different internet now, and content policing by providers of various network services is very much on the table.