Trolls

It is not unusual for me to receive complaints about intemperate or rude comments made within the ICANN community. Some years ago Frank Fowlie produced a most useful paper on the subject which is now placed on my pages at http://www.icann.org/en/help/ombudsman/respectful-communication. There are of course other policies within ICANN which consider similar issues. It is quite understandable when people are passionate about their ideas and policies, that they will occasionally step over the line and send an email or make a post, which often they will subsequently regret. Sadly the nature of the Internet is that sometimes these comments become embedded and impossible to remove because they have been repeated. I suspect in a number of cases the person who made the intemperate comment greatly regrets having done so, but is powerless to remove the trail.I have been following articles about someone who deliberately chooses to make critical, controversial and often very hurtful comments, and sadly this person is located in my own country of New Zealand. Apparently he is aged eighteen. I have a certain experience with teenagers, and understand how the mouth is often engaged before the brain is placed into gear. But one of the lubricants which makes society work is respect for the views of others. Perhaps politeness is regarded as an old-fashioned virtue, and certainly my parents told me that I must be polite. In the dark ages when I was a teenager, I am sure that I did not comply with the requests to be polite. But fortunately any comments I made were not embedded in the darker interstices of the Internet. Now this young New Zealand troll has achieved notoriety throughout the world by intemperate and hurtful comments, which apparently he claims are social experiments.I expect that he is pleased with all of the attention but I rather doubt that we are to see a considered academic consideration of his experiment. I am all for strong debate. But Frank Fowlie's paper has a continued relevance, although I doubt that the eighteen-year-old has read this in preparation for his social experiment.