ICANN legal team disappears up own [bleep]

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," wrote Shakespeare in Henry VI, although he wisely put the words in the mouth of Dick the butcher.

Dick's solution must have seemed pretty attractive to ICANN's communications team earlier this week when it's first podcast in over nine months was duly censored by its legal department for containing the word... well, I can hardly bring myself to say it... the word "Nike".

What's even worse is that the name of the company is used in the most damaging of contexts: talking about shoes. And Nike is a shoe company. You can only imagine the fallout had it been allowed to go ahead.

And so ICANN's crack legal team, who have nothing better to do than read and now listen to every single piece of information that the organization produces and beat it to death did the logical thing and bleeped out the word, leading to the unintentionally hilarious clip you can listen to at the bottom of the page.

Here's the transcript:

I think they matter also because for consumers when you're looking for something on the internet, right now there are sites that look like legitimate sites that may not be legitimate sites. If you're looking for [bleep] shoes and you go to shoes.[bleep] you can be pretty sure that those are going to be actual [bleep]-branded shoes.

You have to wonder whether an organization that hopes to break new ground by expanding the Internet in unforeseen and innovative ways is really compatible with a legal department so paranoid that even mentioning a possible use of its products is enough to make it self-censor.

It's worse than that though. We are reliably informed that ICANN is restricted from using any examples at all of possible new Internet extensions for its flagship program... that will introduce hundreds of new Internet extensions.

• Staff can't use names for which there is not a public application - in case it is perceived as being supportive of the bid
• And they can't use the names of applications that have gone public - in case it is perceived that they are endorsing it.
• In short, they are screwed.

This over-the-top approach - luridly painted as "turning up the heat until I hear squealing" by both ICANN's CEO and General Counsel at the organization's most recent meeting in Dakar - is causing huge discontent within the organization and staff speak of being constantly threatened with legal repercussions if they do anything that is not approved by the legal department.

At a staff meeting soon after CEO Beckstrom announced his "decision to leave", staff were apparently warned not to relay what Beckstrom said under threat of legal action and were directed to its General Counsel John Jeffrey if they had any questions.

Perhaps it was just as well since Beckstrom then went on to bizarrely equate his leaving with the impact of 9/11 on survivors. He even offered counseling services for those who couldn't handle the fact he would no longer be with them. No, we are not making this up.

According to those on the inside, even the suggestion of mockery of the ludicrous preening peacock that is the organization's CEO is dealt with stern looks and peer pressure.

The increasingly oppressive atmosphere was added to by policies drawn up by the legal department that prevent any staff member from accepting anything at all, even a Coca-cola, from a member of the Internet community that may be planning to apply for a new gTLD.

The claim is that this has no impact on staff's normal functioning but the policy was repeatedly criticized by the community at ICANN's most recent meeting and most staff have decided the best way to avoid the gaze of the legal department is to just keep their heads down.

If that wasn't bad enough, there are now rumors that the legal department has held a series of depositions against one of its own staff after it had sent them on home leave without explanation and has banned anyone from talking about the situation or contacting the person impacted. The Board has yet to be apprised of the situation.

With an out of control legal department given final say on everything that happens within ICANN, perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that the organization's $1.5 million communications plan for new gTLDs has been such a spectacular failure.

Even when the comms department does a good job - and this week's podcast is actually pretty good - they get screwed by the suits.

Dick was right. What's amazing is that Shakespeare was allowed to get away with it.

Hat tip to DomainIncite for noticing Bleep-gate first.

Listen to the podcast excerpt below. You may not notice the bleeps at first, so we have repeated the audio immediately afterwards: