It Ain't the Name, It's the Search, Stupid .....

Debate continues to swirl around the proposed transfer of control of the internet's naming function (IANA) to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).  But one of the grounds of concern (censorship) seems, the more I think about it, to be less of a problem.  To be sure, internet names have symbolic first amendment functions.  There is a reason why gTLD names like .gay and .islam generate some attention.  [One of my favorite stories in this regard is the conflict between the book store company Amazon and the governments of Brazil and Peru over a proposed .amazon domain name.]  But, in the end, I am coming to the conclusion that names matter less than search functions.  After all (as my friend Martin Libicki recently reminded me) if you want to buy something (say underwear) you don't navigate to the .underwear domain.  You just type in your search query to your Google/Bing/Safari/Yahoo/etc. search engine and go where that leads you.  For all you care in practice the domain you go to could just be a string of random numbers (a common practice in China, for example) that your search engine identifies as responsive to your query.  The same is true for more politically oriented speech (just try searching for "abortion" and you'll see the wide range of results).  So the actual domain name seems to matter much less than the search algorithms being employed. All of this was brought home to me the other day, by this blog post at the Wall St. Journal:  "In a move that experts say could make it harder to spy on Web users, Google is considering giving a boost in its search-engine results to websites that use encryption, the engineer in charge of fighting spam in search results hinted at a recent conference."  Fundamentally, this would be a good thing for the network -- driving users to greater security.  But it also emphasizes a) how relatively irrelevant the IANA function is to that question; b) how dependent we are on search engines; and c) how essential it is that the search engines uses their position as gate-keeper for beneficent purposes.