ICANN Board member Susan Crawford is also unhappy:
"No centralized authority should set itself up as the arbiter of what people may do together online," Ms. Crawford said in a statement to the board, adding that political pressures played an undue role. "This is not a technical stability and security question."
I mostly agree that this isn't a technical stability
question. As far as the DNS is concerned, there's nothing special
about the string .xxx, after all. As far as security
goes, the only way in which this would be special would be if
ICANN intended to monitor that ICM was enforcing the somewhat
vague conditions that were proposed for
the domain. That's easily fixed by not doing so.
That said, the bit about "no centralized authority" being an "arbiter
of what people may do together online" is a bit hard to understand,
since that's more or less ICANN's reason for existence. Once we've
decided that we're going to issue more TLDS and we're not going to
do it in a mechanical fashion (first come/first served, auction, etc.),
you're pretty much left with some sort of centralized arbiter,
which is what ICANN is. This isn't to say that one can't object
to the decisions ICANN has made or the way it makes them, but that's
different from having a principled objection to them making such decisions
in the first place (not that one can't object to that as well...)
