Feeding the machine

Following 1998, when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was established, many were concerned that it might become a force for censorship. Critics asked: would ICANN remain the neutral technical steward it was intended to be? Turns out, ICANN wasn’t the right vulnerability. The desire to force the Internet content to conform to “local ordinances” (as John Perry Barlow once called the US First Amendment) started before the Internet. In 1994, Robert and Carleen Thomas were imprisoned for transmitting pornographic images from their California-based bulletin board over interstate telephone lines to Tennessee, where they were illegal. Today, US companies are outraged at fines and demands for compliance with the UK’s Online Safety Act requirements for age verification. Now there’s a new twist. In Travis County, Texas, a court has ordered Verisign, the ICANN-appointed Virginia-based registry for .com, to lock a domain belonging to the streaming platform Kick Online…