An awful idea

The World Tribune reports:

“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,’ ” Didi Rankovic reported for Reclaim the Net on April 9. …

And, according to EU DisinfoLab, Rankovic added, “who better to wipe out whatever domain name is deemed to belong to a ‘disinformation site’ than a DNS registrar – and ICANN is the top authority for them all.”

ICANN’s Domain Name System Threat Information Collection and Reporting (DNSTICR) was used during the pandemic to identify domain names that contained terms related to Covid, “but the goal was to find out if the sites abused the keyword(s) to mask phishing or malware proliferating operations, rather than to ‘moderate’ any type of Covid-related content,” Rankovic noted.

EU DisinfoLab is looking to use a system based on DNSTICR to allow for reporting of “genuinely open-and-shut (disinformation) cases” to registrars for removal.

What authority would decide what’s a “genuinely open-and-shut case”?

DisinfoLab’s idea: registries or registrars could “grant media trade associations ‘trusted notifier’ status.”

Give media organisations the power to have ICANN remove domain names from the Internet that the media organisations label disinformation. What a horrifying proposal.