ICANN, Health Information and the "Dot Health" Top Level Domain

Abstract

The problems of poor or biased information and of misleading health and wellbeing advice on the Internet is well known. The recent decision by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to authorize a large number of new generic top-level domains, including some with a clear connection to health or healthcare, presents an opportunity to bring some order to this chaotic situation. In the case of the most general of these domains, ".health", experts advance a compelling argument in favor of some degree of content control. On the opposing side, advocates for Internet freedom counter that this is too valuable to be compromised, and once lost it may never be recovered. The author supports a proposal to bridge the credibility gap in online health information by providing provenance information for websites in the .health domain.