[IP] KAZAKHSTAN / ICANN : Reporters Without Borders raps censorship of UK comedian's "Borat" website
Begin forwarded message:
From: Martin Burack <marty@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: December 14, 2005 9:47:43 PM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: KAZAKHSTAN / ICANN : Reporters Without Borders raps
censorship of UK comedian's "Borat" website
Dave:
For IP, if you'd like.
Marty Burack
Reporters Without Borders / Internet Freedom desk
14 December 2005
KAZAKHSTAN
Reporters Without Borders raps censorship of UK comedian's "Borat"
website
Reporters Without Borders condemned censorship by the Kazakh
government, which has removed the right to use the .kz suffix
(equivalent to .uk) from two websites it finds troublesome,
including that of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, or "Borat".
The worldwide press freedom organisation said it was concerned by
the politicisation of the administration of domain names and has
written to Franck Fowlie, ombudsman for the Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN,) that registers domain
names, asking him to intervene.
Borat.kz carries sketches by Sacha Baron Cohen, who portrays a
sexist and racist Kazakh journalist on the US cable channel HBO.
The Kazakh web business body that manages the .kz – said the site
had been shut because borat.kz was hosted outside Kazakhstan and
false administrators’ names had been given when it was registered.
The government decided last month to deny .kz to sites hosted
abroad, an unjustified step that tightens political control over
Kazakh online publications.
"The role of bodies that manage the country code top-level domain
names (ccTLDs) is above all technical. They are not qualified to
censor the contents of sites", Reporters Without Borders said in
its letter to Frank Fowlie. “We find however that the Kazakh
government sees to it that websites that mock or criticise it are
rejected."
"In this way, it infringes the principles set out by ICANN, which
requires that the management of the ccTLDs should be fair and non
discriminatory’. We think that an intervention by your organisation
would show that it was capable of defending free expression on the
Internet, a key issue when you consider the stormy debates on the
governance of the Internet that marked the recent World Summit on
the Information Society (WSIS)", the letter to the ombudsman said.
The opposition website Navi.kz was forced to give up its .kz at the
end of October after a legal procedure that was stage-managed by
the authorities.
In November, Reporters Without Borders put Kazakhstan on a list of
"countries to watch" because of repeated violations of free
expression on the Internet. See: http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?
id_article=15613
------------------------
Julien Pain
Bureau Internet et libertés / Internet Freedom desk
___________________________________________
Reporters sans frontières / Reporters Without Borders
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