EU DisinfoLab proposes using ICANN’s security system against “disinformation,” raising questions about internet governance and the boundaries of free speech.
EU DisinfoLab, a non-profit officially operating independently but regularly making policy recommendations to the EU and member-states, is now pushing for a security structure created by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to be utilized in the “war on disinformation.”
EU DisinfoLab, which receives grants from George Soros’ controversial Open Society Foundations, is now testing the water regarding “repurposing” of an ICANN security operation set up to combat malware, spam, phishing, etc., and turn it into a tool against “disinformation sites.”
Attempting to directly enlist ICANN would be highly controversial, to put it mildly, at least at this stage. Given its importance in the internet infrastructure – ICANN manages domain names globally – and the fact content control is not among its tasks (DisinfoLab says ICANN “refuses” to do it) – this would represent a huge departure from the organization’s role as we understand it today.
But now DisinfoLab proposes to use “the structure already created by ICANN” against legitimate security threats, to police the internet for content that somebody decides to treat as “disinformation.” It would require “minimal amount of diligence and cooperation” from registries, a blog post said, to accept ICANN-style reports and revoke a site’s domain name.
The justification for all this is that alleged “disinformation doppelganger” sites use domain names that are deceptively similar to “trusted news sites.”