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The Internets domain name system is not the place to police speech. ICANN, the organization that regulates that system, is legally bound not to act as the Internets speech police, but its legal commitments are riddled with exceptions, and aspiring censors have already used those exceptions in harmful ways. This was one factor that made the failed takeover of the .ORG registry such a dangerous situation. But now, ICANN has an opportunity to curb this abuse and recommit to its narrow mission of keeping the DNS running, by placing firm limits on so-called voluntary public interest commitments (PICs, recently renamed Registry Voluntary Commitments, or RVCs).

For many years, ICANN and the domain name registries it oversees have given mixed messages about their commitments to free speech and to staying within their mission. ICANNs bylaws declare that ICANN shall not regulate (i.e., impose rules and restrictions on) services that use the Internets unique identifiers or the content that such services carry or provide. ICANNs mission, according to its bylaws, is to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems. And ICANN, by its own commitment, shall not act outside its Mission.

Buttheres always a but. The bylaws go on to say that ICANNs agreements with registries (the managing entities of each top-level domain like .com, .org, and .horse) and registrars (the companies you pay to register a domain name for your website) automatically fall within ICANNs legal authority, and are immune from challenge, if they were in place in 2016, or if they do not vary materially from the 2016 versions.

Therein lies the mischief. Since 2013, registries have been allowed to make any commitments they like and write them into their contracts with ICANN. Once theyre written into the contract, they become enforceable by ICANN. These voluntary public interest commitments have included many promises made to powerful business interests that work against the rights of domain name users. For example, one registry operator puts the interests of major brands over those of its actual customers by allowing trademark holders to stop anyone else from registering domains that contain common words they claim as brands.

Further, at least one registry has granted itself sole discretion and at any time and without limitation, to deny, suspend, cancel, or transfer any registration or transaction, or place any domain name(s) on registry lock, hold, or similar status for vague and undefined reasons, without notice to the registrant and without any opportunity to respond. This rule applies across potentially millions of domain names. How can anyone feel secure that the domain name they use for their website or app wont suddenly be shut down? With such arbitrary policies in place, why would anyone trust the domain name system with their valued speech, expression, education, research, and commerce?

Voluntary PICs even played a role in the failed takeover of the .ORG registry earlier this year by the private equity firm Ethos Capital, which is run by former ICANN insiders. When EFF and thousands of other organizations sounded the alarm over private investors bid for control over the speech of nonprofit organizations, Ethos Capital proposed to write PICs that, according to them, would prevent censorship. Of course, because the clauses Ethos proposed to add to its contract were written by the firm alone, without any meaningful community input, they had more holes than Swiss cheese. If the sale had succeeded, ICANN would have been bound to enforce Ethoss weak and self-serving version of anti-censorship.

The issue of PICs is now up for review by an ICANN working group known as Subsequent Procedures. Last month, the ICANN Board wrote an open letter to that group expressing concern about PICs that might entangle ICANN in issues that fall outside of ICANNs technical mission. It bears repeating that the one thing explicitly called out in ICANNs bylaws as being outside of ICANNs mission is to regulate Internet services or the content that such services carry or provide. The Board asked the working group [pdf] for guidance on how to utilize PICs and RVCs without the need for ICANN to assess and pass judgment on content.

EFF supports this request, and so do many other organizations and stakeholders who dont want to see ICANN become another content moderation battleground. Theres a simple, three-part solution that the Subsequent Procedures working group can propose:

In short, while registries can run their businesses as they see fit, ICANNs contracts and enforcement systems should have no role in content regulation, or any other rules and policies beyond the ones the ICANN Community has made together.

A guardrail on the PIC/RVC process will keep ICANN true to its promise not to regulate Internet services and content.It will help avoid another situation like the failed .ORG takeover, by sending a message that censorship-for-profit is against ICANNs principles. It will also help registry operators to resist calls for censorship by governments (for example, calls to suppress truthful information about the importation of prescription medicines). This will preserve Internet users trust in the domain name system.

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ICANN Can Stand Against Censorship (And Avoid Another .ORG Debacle) by Keeping Content Regulation and Other Dangerous Policies Out of Its Registry...

It should be noted that books about trans people are among the most censored books in the U.S. Of the books the American Library Association identified as the top 10 most challenged in 2019, the majority either explored trans issues, featured trans characters, or were written by trans peopletitles like Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out and the picture book about a trans girl, I Am Jazz. Trans writers and trans organizers alike have been censored in the ways Shrier believes she is being censored, though those stories rarely attract the level of attention from the same writers now defending her.

In those cases, the demands to censor trans books may not necessarily be coming from the government itself. But the demands are in alignment with the governments broader aims to suppress trans peoples rights. They share a common goal: restrain, if not remove, trans people from our shared civic life. Strangio is cognizant of this power dynamic. As he wrote in comments to Greenwald that were not included in his story but tweeted by Greenwald in full, I believe in fighting the central premise of these arguments and building support for what every major medical association has made clearthat care for youth is safe, effective, and life savingand ensuring that trans youth dont die as a result of these criminal bans. Anti-trans suppression leads, too, to the death of free speech. It may also lead to the death of trans people.

In his defense of Shrier, Greenwald does not acknowledge that the far more common censorship scenario in the U.S. is for trans peoples speechtheir gender expression itself, tooto be targeted. He is familiar with Strangios legal work, he writes, noting the fight it took for Chelsea Manning to be treated with dignity, including being allowed access to hormones, when she was in military prison at Fort Leavenworth (where she was sentenced after being put on trial for leaking critical documents about the Iraq War). Trans people still face incomparable societal hurdlesincluding an epidemic of violenceeven when they enjoy networks of support in the middle of progressive cities, Greenwald wrote in 2017, after Manning was released. But to do that while in a military brig, in the middle of Kansas, where your daily life depends exclusively upon your military jailers, is both incomprehensibly difficult and incomprehensibly courageous.

Chelsea Manning is an extraordinary example of an ordinary circumstance: Institutional gatekeepers stand between trans people and their self-determination, and those gatekeepers still have more power than trans people have. It is in that context that Strangio raises questions about the harm a book like Shriers can doabout the true, complex boundaries of speech. Is a rude email to the people at Spotify who pay Joe Rogans bills, which allows him to host a long chat with Shrier and put it in front of millions of people, at all comparable to that institutional gatekeeping? What about when the argument made in that chat empowers the gatekeepers, and at trans peoples expense?

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The Dangerous Inversions of the Debate Around Trans Censorship - The New Republic

Its easy to forget what a recent phenomenon freedom of expression is, even in this country. Until 1959, British publishers could be sent to jail for producing books deemed to have a tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.

Back then, the things that couldnt be said were largely sexual. James Joyces masterpiece, Ulysses, was banned indeed burned on the grounds of obscenity. A single line in Radclyffe Halls The Well of Loneliness (And that night they were not divided) convinced a magistrate that all copies must be destroyed, because it could induce thoughts of a most impure character and would glorify the horrible tendency of lesbianism.

The bravery of successive generations of publishers, their mischievous insistence on thumbing their nose at the censors, helped bring about the sexual revolution, enabling us all to live and love and read more freely. The obscenity trial, 60 years ago, of Lady Chatterleys Lover (or more accurately, of its publisher, Penguin Books), is widely recognised as the moment when the gates of artistic and sexual freedom were finally blown open.

Now, though, there are those who wish to drag them shut again. This time it isnt the grey elderly ones, as Lawrence described his censors, having apoplexies over the written word. Today, the blue pencil hovers in the hand of young progressives some of them, astonishingly, publishers themselves.

Staff at Penguin Random House tried this week to block the publication of a new book by Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic whose contempt for identity politics has earned him a huge following on the Right. At a town hall meeting at Penguins Canada office, employees argued that the publisher should not give a platform to an icon of hate speech. According to one of those present, people were crying in the meeting about how Mr Peterson has affected their lives, with one employee fretting that the publication of the book would negatively affect their non-binary friend.

To Penguins great credit, it is pressing ahead with publication. But as the social justice generation moves up the media hierarchy, this bizarre sight publishers protesting against their own publishing house for publishing a book will only become more common.

Earlier this year, the US firm Hachette dropped its plans to publish Woody Allens memoirs after staff staged a walkout. The American journalist Abigail Shrier has described how her latest book, an investigation into the rise in transgender identification among adolescent girls, was dropped by her first publishers following protests by staff. When another publisher picked it up, newspapers refused to review it. When the podcaster Joe Rogan interviewed Shrier about her book, staff at Spotify, the podcast platform, threatened to walk out. Censorship is once more in the ascendant.

They are so easily rattled, these new inspectors of literary hygiene. No sensible critic of Peterson would claim that his books constitute hate speech. (Unlike Mein Kampf, which Penguin, quite rightly, continues to publish on the grounds of public interest.) The argument against Peterson seems to be that, even if he isnt a neo-Nazi, some of his fans are. But since when did we judge a book by its readers?

If reading has any moral purpose, it is that it broadens our understanding of the world by exposing us to different ideas. This is what makes publishing an exalted profession: its whole purpose is to find ideas and set them free. A publisher should be a liberator, not a jailer.

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The attempt to censor Jordan Peterson shows the intolerance of the social justice generation - Telegraph.co.uk

We lift the lid on an odious policy by a major PR provider. It is imperative that all FX and CFD firms read this carefully.

The first step was to remove liberties and livelihoods, and the second step is censorship.

This is the method by which illiberal powers that be erode free enterprise and control the minds of the entrepreneurial.

Back in March, a number of members of society (myself excluded Ed) actually believed in the initiative by world governments that locking the world down was somehow in the best interests of the unsuspecting and uninitiated global population.

Here we are, eight months later, almost the time in which it takes for a human being to come into the world, and the attempts to curtail business, personal activity, social activity, and well normal behavior are still in full swing.

Naturally, as an inquisitive and intelligent species, hundreds of millions of people are now beginning to understand that control to this extent is unpalatable at best, and has questionable motives at worst, so in order to maintain it, governments are now stepping up their propaganda efforts.

However, it is not just governments that are doing so, but privately owned media and PR entities, which are resorting to censorship on a very extensive scale in order to ensure that they toe the party line.

The FX and CFD industry has done well during the past few months, and our collective commitment to innovation, hard working diligence and ingenuity has led the electronic trading sector to prosperity, especially given the efficiency of modern trading platforms and their respective brokerages, in providing easy and good quality access to global currency, stock and equities markets during the times at which many people are working from home, or have to search for another form of income at a time during which many have lost their jobs and new jobs arent plentiful.

Additionally, the extra volatility caused by this years extremely unusual circumstances has stirred tremendous interest among retail traders, so existing client bases of brokerages have traded at high volumes, and in some cases record volumes.

Of course, this is all great news for the FX industry, however whilst activity is up, and many FX firms have spoken to FinanceFeeds over the past few months stating that they have never been busier. My colleagues here in Canary Wharf are working flat out from early morning until late at night to cope with the extra business that is being processed.

Yes, it is boom time for the FX industry, but very much a disaster for pretty much every other industry sector worldwide, with no end in sight.

What, it is feasible to ask, does a firm do in order to capitalize on the demand for FX trading and gain more customers?

The usual method is to channel some of the profit into marketing in order to bring on board new clients whilst there is good revenue. This way, the marketing spend can be increased, and new types of client demographic onboarded without making any dent in expected income.

Similarly, it is also prudent to approach new channels, and develop new asset classes or products for new audiences in order to appeal to a different sector of society, thus making your brokerage more sustainable in future.

These are sensible, normal methods of expanding a business during a time of good revenue generation.

The question is, how? Traditionally, being an online business sector, FX and CFD companies, along with their relative technology vendors, liquidity providers and platform integration firms would meet at conferences, an extremely popular point in the annual calendar of all FX firms pioneered almost ten years ago by Finance Magnates (known at that time as Forex Magnates) and followed by many other entities since.

These industry conferences have been viewed by the entire industry globally from Tier 1 banks to global exchanges like CME Group, all the way through all brokerages and payment firms, platform companies as absolutely essential, and have brought every component of the entire industry together so that they all now know each other personally, whereas formerly they were separate online entities.

However, these events are no longer allowed which is a travesty.

Thus, electronic trading firms, which need to get their presence known, need to step up their digital remit once again, because it is an online world only now.

How? I hear you ask. Well, the traditional PR method has now fallen into the hands of the censors.

Not only are all social media and business news sites censored in case any content doesnt toe the new pro-lockdown, pro-Covid line, but PR sites that brokerages actually pay a lot of money for are now censoring content.

PRNewsWire, owned by Cision, which is a well known and widely read PR aggregation site used by all industry sectors and is hugely popular with companies across all aspects of the FX industry, has issued a notice on its site detailing its policy if it can be called that.

Under the ominous title of How to Ensure Your COVID-19 Press Release Gets Published,it says Crafting an engaging press release that stands out is challenging in the best of times, not to mention during a time of great uncertainty with a news cycle that changes by the minute. Releases need to be extra-sensitive and thoughtful in the time of COVID-19, and we at Cision wanted to lend some guidance to help ensure that any COVID-19 related press release meets the PR Newswire guidelines.

There is a document available for download which details all of this in full, however here are the important points:

If this is to be taken seriously, it gives a clear impression that any PRs submitted to the internet and indexed in search engines via the PRNewsWire site will not be published if they have titles such as Our brokerage experiences great increases in revenue during Covid for example, as that comes under their absurd rule of newsjacking which really means not following the narrative of the totalitarians in government.

Another example would be perhaps Multi-asset brokerage offers access to derivatives for extra income during Covid/pandemic/situation (or whatever anyone wants to call it these days) as this would be attempting to attempting to make an unfair profit from this situation even they are using the marketing spin we have all heard from governments in calling it a situation. I would call it the waste product which emanates from the alimentary canal of the male of the bovine species.

For brokers or media entities wishing to promote their online webinars to clients, or business-to-business online seminars, thats out too. Join our Zoom in which panels will discuss how to move your brokerage forward in the times of Coronavirus which is a very popular panel discussion on every single Zoom conference I have attended lately and I have attended a lot is out of the question according to PRNewsWires criteria.

You cannot talk about volatility due to big pharma stock rises, you cannot promote services aimed to help people wishing to trade during these times and you cannot publish quarterly results which attribute any rises in revenue or volatility to the current situation if we really must call it that.

The more you read into the rules set out by this censorship, the less you can write about your companys innovations, new products and adaptability to the new method of doing business that we have all been forced into by anti-business, pro-lockdown, censorship-happy authorities in Western nations.

PRNewsWire charges an absolute fortune for even the smallest of PR. It is not in my personal remit to advise anyone to part with money to place PR on any media site, I believe in freedom and free enterprise. The more the merrier.

However, if this is how the good customers of a site which is supposed to provide a service to help them promote their products are treated, it may be time to look elsewhere. until they are censored too.

FinanceFeeds maintains an absolute commitment to freedom of information, to uncovering important matters of public and commercial interest within the electronic trading industry, to assisting all areas of the FX industry to provide detailed editorial to reach their potential commercial or retail clients and absolutely promise that we will never implement censorship of any kind.

That way, transparency is upheld, business can be conducted without barriers, and the most important news and developments within our industry are documented for the greater good of all its participants.

Open dialog and open publication is vital to online industries such as ours.

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In this age of censorship lunacy, your online presence and PR will never be the same again - FinanceFeeds

PlayStation is reportedly censoring PS5 users on Twitter. Over the course of the PS4 generation, Sony came under fire from some PlayStation gamers for censoring sexual content in a few different games. Continuing this streak of censorship, it's now censoring PS5 users on Twitter, or at least that's what new reports claim. More specifically, users are reporting that the PS5's share functionality comes equipped with a built-in profanity filter that prohibits users from using certain words when tweeting from their PS5 by blocking the publication of the tweet until the word is removed. Adding to this, apparently, the filter is broken, with one user providing a concrete example of a tweet being flagged for containing problematic language, except it doesn't contain any profanity whatsoever.

Reports of the filter can be found from Twitter to Reddit, but the best example comes way of Patrick Beja. Taking to the former social media platform, Beja revealed that when trying to share a post about Astro's Playroom, full of PG praise for the game and Sony, the PS5 blocked its publication, citing issues with the text.

As you can see below, the tweet has zero profanity, though it's possible "torrent" is triggering the filter, though, for now, this is just a theory.

Oddly enough, there's no mention of this feature within the parental controls, which suggests it can not be removed.

At the moment of publishing, Sony has not commented on this feature or the backlash and speculation it has created. If this changes -- or if more information on the filter itself is provided -- we will be sure to update the story. Until then, for more coverage on the PS5 -- including all of the latest news, rumors, leaks, guides, and deals -- click here or check out the links below:

H/T, The Gamer.

Read more from the original source:
PlayStation Reportedly Censoring PS5 Users on Twitter - ComicBook.com