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Websites using .org domain names fear they could lose their web addresses as intense backlash over the domain registrys proposed sale continues.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the not-for-profit organization that coordinates the internets domain name system, is deciding whether control of .org will be sold to a private equity firm about which little is known.

The change of hands has raised concerns about censorship and how internet infrastructure affects free speech.

Websites using .org can be registered by anybody, but over the past decade the suffix has become the go-to domain term for not-for-profits and charities. The transfer of control of .org domains has left many concerned that a new owner could raise the price of addresses on the .org registry, making it prohibitively expensive for not-for-profits that have come to rely on its name recognition.

The not-for-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with the Domain Name Rights Coalition, Access Now, and others, wrote to Icann last week urging it to stop the sale.

Essentially it means selling censorship, Mitch Stoltz, a senior staff attorney at EFF focusing on free speech and trademark issues, said of the sale. It could mean suspending domain names, causing websites to go dark when some other powerful interest wants them gone.

These concerns were exacerbated when in 2019, Icann removed the cap on the price for a .org domain, having previously prohibited registrars from being charged more than $8.25.

Until now, .org has been managed by the not-for-profit Public Interest Registry (PIR) created by the Internet Society exclusively for the purpose. Icann awarded control of .org to the Internet Society, another not-for-profit, in 2002.

Icann is deciding if it will approve the sale of the domain registry to Ethos Capital, a private firm that emerged recently. Ethos has stated that it will keep prices low, but critics say because it is a for-profit company, it has no economic incentive to do so.

Icann abruptly delayed its decision on Monday after receiving a scathing letter from the California attorney general, Xavier Becerra, on 15 April about the potential sale of .org.

Becerras letter came after not-for-profits and other internet freedom advocates said privatizing the domain registry would saddle it with more than $300m in debt.

Because Icann is incorporated in California, Becerra is in charge of ensuring it is living up to its commitments. It will provide an update on 4 May.

There is mounting concern that ICANN is no longer responsive to the needs of its stakeholders, Becerra wrote.

The attorney general of Pennsylvania is also reportedly investigating the deal. Because PIR, the organization selling .org, is incorporated there, the state would have the power to stop it from happening.

Andrew Sullivan, the CEO of the Internet Society, said those using the .org domain registry would be better served by Ethos, which would have more resources than a not-for-profit to fund them.

He noted that the firm had been making changes responsive to criticism about the potential sale. Commitments include a cap on price increases for eight years from the start of the current contract and a stewardship council that will have a say over policies affecting .org sites.

This shows Ethos is trying very hard to be a good steward of this resource, he said.

Former members of Icann disagree. On Monday, its former CEO, Michael Roberts, and other former members wrote a letter criticizing the decision and imploring his successors to delay the transaction for six months.

We write to express our deep dismay at ICANNs rejection of its defining public-interest regulatory purpose as demonstrated in the totally inappropriate proposed sale of the .org delegation, they wrote. ICANN has not meaningfully acted to address the likely proposed service cuts, increase in prices or trafficking of data of non-profits to obtain additional revenue.

The debate has taken on new life amid the coronavirus pandemic. Advocates for not-for-profits are concerned about the debt incurred by the sale as coronavirus creates economic uncertainty.

In his letter to Icann, Becerra said the $300m in debt will change the relationship .org has with its sites.

If the sale goes through and PIRs business model fails to meet expectations, it may have to make significant cuts in operations, Becerra said. Such cuts would undoubtedly affect the stability of the .org registry.

This is of particular concern as not-for-profit sites have become more important than ever during the coronavirus pandemic, said Amy Sample Ward, CEO of the technology not-for-profit NTEN.

Most of the entities leading in data and information aggregation, scientific investigation and developments, community resourcing and response are all non-profits with .org websites, she said. Those organizations also stand to lose a great deal if this deal proceeds.

Read more:
'Selling censorship': proposed sale of .org web registry sparks fears for non-profits - The Guardian

F. Scott Fitzgeralds novel The Great Gatsby begins with narrator Nick Carraway telling the reader,

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that Ive been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world havent had the advantages that youve had.

I thought about this when I read that the Mat-Su School Board, taking time off from a pandemic, voted 5-2 to ban The Great Gatsby and four other works of fiction from high school courses. The book was cited for language and sexual references. Apparently the censors were not disturbed that Gatsby, near the end of the novel, is murdered.

But I am not going to criticize the school board. I have had an advantage they have not had. While they were working, raising their families, I was off reading books. By now, thousands of them. This has given me a perspective on what makes a good book, a bad book and has destroyed any nascent interest I had in censorship. If you watch thousands of Major League Baseball games, you will have a deeper understanding of the game than the average fan. The school board members are, at best, average fans.

I cant get too upset because I know that some students, ever resourceful and imaginative, will buy or borrow The Great Gatsby, or Tim OBriens The Things They Carried, Joseph Hellers Catch-22, Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man and Maya Angelous I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. These students, its a pretty safe guess, will be mystified by the ban. Some of the boys will look for, as we said at Lathrop High School in Fairbanks, the good parts and find few. Besides, students protected from Gatsby use social media and can easily access such film classics such as High School Harlots and On Golden Blonde.

The urge to censor must be as basic as the urge to write. The Mat-Su school board looks ridiculous to people who read, but American censors have looked ridiculous for a long time.

Thomas Beer (1889-1940) wrote a history of American culture in the 1890s his childhood. He especially singled out magazines for self-censoring to escape Victorian censure. Beer notes that the great magazines like Harpers, which reached the entire country, had stories about every creature under the sun except one: a horizontal woman.

This anecdote is a bit of hyperbole, as Beer later explains that the magazines would write about infidelity in a moral tract disguised as a story. A married man could take up with his neighbors wife no moving parts, please as long as the next morning the couple was tormented by guilt, terrified of what was to come, and committed suicide, preferably by drowning.

But then this was an era when the local head of the Daughters of the American Revolution, stereotypically a big, large-bosomed woman under a gigantic hat, would go to the sheriff to complain about the village atheist. The sheriff, perplexed, would wonder, Well, maam, what is he doing? Sputtering with frustration, the voice of morality would pour out, Whats he doing? Whats he doing? Whats he doing? Why, everything.

Writers look at the world through their imagination and allow their imagination to wander into complex human situations. Thats everything, to those threatened by books.

Tim OBrien, on the censors list, wrote about a lieutenant in a foxhole in Vietnam thinking about a girl. The lieutenant wasnt real, the girl wasnt real OBrien invented them but they were too real for a majority of the Mat-Su school board.

Michael Carey is an Anchorage Daily News columnist.

The rest is here:
The Mat-Su school board and the urge to censor - Anchorage Daily News

from the free-speech-saves-lives dept

We've been writing a lot about the need for real transparency in the midst of a pandemic. The lessons to be learned from Taiwan's transparency compared to China's censorship and speech stifling are important. Tragically, it has become abundantly clear that the US is following the path of China, not Taiwan.

We've already covered hospitals trying to silence doctors and nurses from revealing what's actually happening within their hospitals, Jared Kushner hiding his coronavirus task force efforts in a private email account, and the CDC's tragic media gag order for its staff, but it's looking much, much worse.

A bunch of stories came out on Wednesday that more or less show how hard the government is working towards silencing anyone "off message" within the administration. First came a NY Times report that head of the the HHS group working on a COVID-19 vaccine was dismissed from his job for daring to question Trump's weird infatuation with hydroxychloroquine as the "miracle cure" to COVID-19 (which studies now suggest actually may be killing more patients than it's saving). Dr. Rick Bright, who had been the director of the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, released quite a statement about what happened:

I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit. I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science not politics or cronyism has to lead the way.

I have spent my entire career in vaccine development, in the government with CDC and BARDA and also in the biotechnology industry. My professional background has prepared me for a moment like this to confront and defeat a deadly virus that threatens Americans and people around the globe. To this point, I have led the governments efforts to invest in the best science available to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unfortunately, this resulted in clashes with H.H.S. political leadership, including criticism for my proactive efforts to invest early into vaccines and supplies critical to saving American lives. I also resisted efforts to fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections.Specifically, and contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit.

While I am prepared to look at all options and to think outside the box for effective treatments, I rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public. I insisted that these drugs be provided only to hospitalized patients with confirmed COVID-19 while under the supervision of a physician.

These drugs have potentially serious risks associated with them, including increased mortality observed in some recent studies in patients with COVID-19.

Sidelining me in the middle of this pandemic and placing politics and cronyism ahead of science puts lives at risk and stunts national efforts to safely and effectively address this urgent public health crisis.

I will request that the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services investigate the manner in which this administration has politicized the work of BARDA and has pressured me and other conscientious scientists to fund companies with political connections and efforts that lack scientific merit.

Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths. Science, in service to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump politics.

But, that's not all. Around the same time that story came out, the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration wanted to fire Nancy Messonnier, the CDC official who had spoken out in February about the likelihood of COVID-19 becoming a global pandemic. Rather than heeding her words, they wanted to fire her (and did appear to gag her from speaking to the media).

On Feb. 25, Nancy Messonnier, a CDC official, said the agency was preparing for a potential pandemic and that community spread of the virus was likely. The stock market plunged.

At a media briefing later that day, Mr. Azar sought to quell concerns, saying the virus was contained.

But it was too late. A furious Mr. Trump, flying back to Washington from India, called Mr. Azar and threatened to oust Dr. Messonnier.

The next day, the president announced he was putting Vice President Pence in charge of the federal responsenews Mr. Azar learned a few hours before the announcement.

And then, soon after those reports came out, in his daily political rally press conference, the President hauled out CDC director, Robert Redfield, asking him say that the Washington Post misquoted him in its story warning that a second wave of COVID-19 infections could be even more problematic, as it could be timed to coincide with next winter's flu season. Here's what the Washington Post said:

Theres a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through, CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview with The Washington Post. And when Ive said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they dont understand what I mean.

Were going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time, he said.

Trump claimed that Redfield was "totally misquoted" saying that he spoke to Redfield and that Redfield told him "it was ridiculous.":

I do want to mention, Dr. Robert Redfield was totally misquoted in the media about the fall season and the virus. Totally misquoted. I spoke to him and he said it was ridiculous, the president said during the daily Coronavirus Task Force briefing at the White House.

He was talking about the flu and coronavirus coming together at the same time, and we will knock it out. Well knock it out fast. Thats what he was referring to, coming together at the same time, Trump continued.

I would ask Dr. Redfield to straighten out. He didnt say it was a big explosion. The headline in the Washington Post was ridiculous, which is, as I say, fake news and CNN is fake news, which they knew.

Except that he then called Redfield up to the podium... and he noted that he had been quoted accurately, but did want to "clarify" his quotes:

"The issue I was talking about being more difficult is that we're going to have two viruses circulating at the same time. This spring we had a benefit of having the flu season ending so we could use all our flu surveillance systems to say this is coronavirus, we need to focus. Next fall and winter, we are going to have two viruses circulating and we are going to have to distinguish between which is flu and which is coronavirus. And so the comment that I made it's more difficult. It doesn't mean it's impossible, it doesn't mean it's going to be worse. It just means it's more difficult because we have to distinguish between the two."

Which is what the Washington Post article said. Some have argued that Redfield and Trump's complaints are about the Washington Post's headline, which claimed: "CDC director warns second wave of coronavirus is likely to be even more devastating" and it appears they're taking issue with the use of the word "devastating." But that seems to be a perfectly reasonable word to sum up what Redfield is saying. Indeed, as many people noted, before Trump threw this little temper tantrum, Redfield himself had retweeted the Washington Post article approvingly, saying nothing about the headline:

So, yet again, all of these stories suggest a similar theme: the President and the administration are -- like the Chinese government -- heavily focused on controlling the message, and making things look rosier than they really are, and not accurately telling the public and the press what is going on. And, once again, that's a very real life or death situation. In times of crisis like this, leadership is the ability to tell the truth, no matter how bad, and put forth a plan of action to deal with the situation and to chart the best path forward while acknowledging the challenges. That's not what this administration is doing. It's trying to silence dissent, and look for any silly scrap of "positive spin" it can find.

And people are dying because of it.

Filed Under: cdc, china, covid-19, donald trump, free speech, hhs, messaging, nancy messonnier, rick bright, robert redfield, silencing, transparency, us

Here is the original post:
Censorship Kills: US Government's Focus On COVID-19 'Messaging' Over Actual Protection Did Real Damage - Techdirt

Twitter and YouTube have censored AYTU BioScience, a publicly-traded Colorado-based pharmaceutical company, after it promoted ultraviolet (UV) light developed in conjunction with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center as a potential treatment for the Chinese virus. Twitter later reversed its censorship, saying the companys account was mistakenly caught in a spam filter.

AYTU is publicly traded on the NASDAQ index. In its research on UV light treatment for the coronavirus, it is working with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, a major hospital in Los Angeles. The hospital was founded in 1902 and employs over 2,000 physicians.

More information about the Healight UV Light treatment being researched by AYTU and Cedars-Sinai can be found on the latters website.

UV light has recently been discussed by President Donald Trump as a potential treatment for the coronavirus, leading to a slew of articles from the mainstream media condemning his comments as dangerous.

For example, theNew York Timesrecently published a piece titled Trump Muses About Light as Remedy, but Also Disinfectant, Which Is Dangerous. The article highlights the links between UV light, a natural byproduct of sunlight that is also used in indoor tanning facilities, and skin cancer. Business Insider quoted experts who called Trumps UV light comments exceedingly dangerous, while NBC News suggested the treatment is being pushed by conspiracy theorists.

YouTube and Twitter both took down material from AYTU BioScience, a pharmaceutical company that is investigating UV light treatment as a potential treatment for Wuhan coronavirus. Twitter briefly banned AYTUs official account, while YouTube has taken down a video from the company about UV light treatment.

Twitter later reversed its censorship and reinstated AYTUs account. A Twitter spokeswoman said the account had been mistakenly banned after it was caught in a spam filter, and that this has now been reversed.

AYTUs video about UV treatment remains banned on YouTube. It was taken down by the Google-owned company afterNew York Timesreporter David Alba reached out to the tech giant.

Attempts to access the video now return a message saying the video has been banned for violating YouTubes community guidelines.

Google has yet to return Breitbart News request for comment about the videos removal. Breitbart News also requested comment from AYTU Bioscience but did not receive a response before publishing.

Are you an insider at Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email addressallumbokhari@protonmail.com.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.

Read this article:
YouTube and Twitter Censor Pharma Company Researching UV Light Treatment for Chinese Virus - Breitbart

There are so many quotes to choose from to express ourselves in this, or any other time of great turmoil, authored by our long-time friend, George Orwell.

We all probably know by now that oppressors of free-thinking people will eagerly try to mess up with their perception of reality, hoping to make slavery look like freedom, ignorance like strength, and of course, war like peace.

Theres another quote that may hit you even worse or better as your overall experience of slavery, ignorance, and war may be: In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Double your web browsing speed with today's sponsor. Get Brave.

In any case, thats one of the slogans attributed to Orwell, that his fellow-citizens, London Real, are now using to promote their media outlet thats suddenly come under considerable Big Tech pressure.

And if you thought London Reals sentiment was purely drawing from the local experience, think again: the overarching message here is that from the Gettysburg Address, about a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Democracy, in a word.

The UK-based website and its founder, Brian Rose, have announced their own way to getting there: a new digital freedom platform that will livestream content major Silicon Valley giants, such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, no longer allow.

The whole thing was set in motion recently when in the midst of uncertainty, fear, and censorship surrounding the coronavirus pandemic the outlet aired a now-infamous interview with David Icke that got hammered with bans on mainstream social media.

Its not about whether or not you agree with a point of view, London Real argues its about whether you think unique and informed voices should be allowed to be heard at all.

This platform believes the latter to be the case, and appear to find themselves somewhat perplexed at coming under attack nine years into providing content that never attracted so much attention from censors before.

We dont believe you need to be told what you can (and cant) watch and we are firm proponents of the principles of free speech and freedom of the press, they say.

Visit link:
London Real to build new Digital Freedom platform to avoid Big Tech censorship after David Icke interview - Reclaim The Net