Dear Milton, It's true, I don’t believe that domain names and ICANN matter a lot, enough so that the “global community” – the general public, that is – ought to care about them as political issues that break, say, the top one hundred debates in which they should participate. You put it well in Ruling the Root: “The dirty little secret of the whole affair is that domain names are not nearly as valuable or as important as the new institutional regime would like to pretend they are.” That was in 2002, and the five years that have followed have ratified that line of thinking. That’s part of why, when I witness the countless hours spent by diplomats, academics, and public interest advocates around tables and at conferences to gravely discuss the future of the domain name system, I feel bad: I think that enormous effort is misplaced. There are so many more threats to free speech online, along so many different dimensions, by actors both public and private, that to put so much emphasis on ICANN and domain names is a shame. One virtue is that the debates appear to be attracting lots of government officials who otherwise would be spending their time seeking to regulate some other aspect of the Net. (This is not to express a view on efforts beyond DNS issues undertaken through enterprises like the "Internet Governance Forum.") Free expression is important to me – I’m one of the founders of the OpenNet Initiative, which invests a lot of effort in figuring out where Internet filtering is taking place and by whom, and alerting the public to it. Nonetheless, your example of a government censoring book titles (but not book contents) falls flat for me. Whether or not such a practice infringes rights of free expression (to be sure, I think it would), any such bizarrely limited censorship would have near-zero effect. People would still hear about and read the Letter from the Birmingham Jail even if its title were a number rather than a name, and they’d read 1984 even if it were preceded by 1983 (say, an auto parts manual) and followed by 1985 (the ICANN organizational chart). In fact, they'd come up with different ways of naming books -- starting to refer to them, say, by the title of the first chapter, just as now we use title instead of an ISBN, even though titles aren't unique. I'm not even sure that censoring book titles is analogous to ICANN's power over TLDs. The petition that inspired my blog entry (that in turn inspired yours) was about top-level domains: as you know, things like .xxx and .museum. To have a say in those is not like the government censoring book titles. It’s a step even more removed, akin to government censoring the names of publishing houses. A book called “I Think People Who Disagree with Me Are Completely Divorced from the Realities of International Politics and Internet Control” can express its topic pretty readily even if its publisher were bizarrely compelled to be named “Rainbow and Buttercups Press” rather than “Regan Books.” Yes, it’s still absurd to regulate the names of publishers – just as I think it’s silly to have such strict caps on the number and titles of TLDs. But the existence of these caps just doesn't ring true to me as a front line free expression issue, any more than the fact that street names are chosen by the government, and red and blue staters alike sometimes must share an address on, say, “John F. Kennedy Street.” It seems to be very clear to you that allowing ICANN to select some new TLDs and not others must immediately touch all other kinds of content online. I'd love, then, an answer to the same question I asked Dan Krimm in our kindly back-and-forth on concurringopinions: how can control over top-level domains plausibly be leveraged into control over something more? So far I just see the claim that to think otherwise is to be ignorant. Maybe you think that accepting the mere idea of content-based decisions about TLDs is enough to encourage other parties elsewhere in the Internet system to censor other things. But they neither seek nor need such encouragement. The real danger has to be that ICANN itself could somehow become a tool for broader censorship by despots. And there, for reasons I’ve explained in my review of your excellent book, the way domain names work largely precludes that, issues about WHOIS and UDRP notwithstanding. We are guarding the wrong door when we try to rally the global public around the mess of domain name management rather than around the places where censorship that truly bites is happening, and where it can expand. As the review said: the idiosyncratic position in which we found the domain name system—conclusively owned by no one, and with all hands more or less agreeing that it should be operated according to varying notions of the public interest—likely will not be repeated for newer Internet developments. For example, Google can knock down a web site’s karma in a heartbeat, something with a far greater impact on speech than a domain name placed on hold, and yet no one thinks Google should be run as a public interest organization. Myspace or Facebook or Wordpress can pull someone's cherished online nest, and point to their flexible terms of service prohibiting anything "objectionable." I see those puzzles as much more pressing and vital. The firms that offer these applications, the ISPs who carry bits to and from their users, and the makers of the physical devices we use as our windows onto the network are the actors to watch: their activities are the most important test cases for theories of Internet governance. ...JZ