Community Talk

Do you have a question you'd like to ask Berkman fellows or faculty? What is it? Email us at amichel AT cyber.harvard.edu. One question will be selected and addressed by Berkman fellows and faculty in the next edition of the Filter (May 3rd is date of next publication).  The Filter is Berkman's monthly newsletter and includes commentary on the last month's internet news, Berkman updates, links to conferences, articles, podcasts, audio, blogposts, and presentations, as well as a unique Global Voices monthly digest.

Last month Jason C. asked, “Why do the xxx domain and others keep getting pushed out? It seems to me that there is very little downside to adding this domain.”

To which Jonathan Zittrain responded, “People should be perfectly happy to see lots of new top-level domains—dozens or even hundreds of them. I think that having them be “sponsored,” as .museum is, might even be helpful for certain applications—bona fide banks might exist in .bank, for example, making it harder for phishers to trick people into thinking they were at another web site. But domain names work best when they are not meant to vouch for or against the content found within them, because they’re not really built to digitally certify anything. In the meantime, we should be indifferent to whether .xxx is created—or even to whether US Government pressure delays a decision by ICANN on the matter. This is because domain names themselves don’t really matter these days (people use search). It should come as no surprise, given the way ICANN is structured, that it’s easy for any number of powerful parties to stop something it wants to do.”

You can check out last month's edition here.  Or sign up to receive the Filter by email here.