Re: [ICANN-EU] meeting esther dyson - a very short report

["Griffini Giorgio" <grunz@tin.it>]

Jefsey wrote:
> Dear Giorgio,
> You absolutely right. But probably "public space" means a space reserved
> to "public bodies", ie Govs in many brains around. This is what we have to
> show them wrong. To do that we have to show that the public uses that
> space. If you know a way for making the public moving on this, thank you
> to let us know. If you want to share in an action towards that and have some
> ressource, please let us know. There have been many attempt, but may this
> tim it will be better...
> Jefsey

Jefsey, I think that concerns expressed by Esther Dyson were about 
asserting as absolute concept that internet name space is public space 
available to a general public and in the same moment giving out directions on 
how this "public space" has to be made available to such general public.
In some countries this kind of concept does'nt fit well because each of any 
country governments would like/should have the control on this last aspect of 
'how to' make public resources available to general public. In such view there 
is no difference between a car route/public territory resource and a name 
space resource.
I think that what we can enforce is just that Internet domain name system 
name space is a resource for general public but we cannot drive any 
government in making this available to general public in the same manner. 
I think this is outside the ICANN role and any country government 
should/must be able to decide for itself.
On the other side, for those countries who agreed to have a GAC 
representative, there is a shared point of view about on how this has to be 
handled. Countries which decided to be involved in the GAC committee 
agreed to say that the Governement of a population for which a namespace 
is being devoted to doesn't need/should not be involved in day to day 
decision on this namespace but should anyway have the final word on the 
way this is being made available.
So, in summary, I think the the concept of "DNS=public space destined to 
general public" is quite well enforced and agreed upon but there is no way 
(nor ICANN should try) to enforce a common model on how to make this 
namespace available.

The membership@large is instead an attempt for ICANN to have the opinions 
of users only, which, by not being disclosed who they are, are not under 
control/pressure of each country government politic view.

Best regards
Giorgio Griffini

> 
> 
> 
> At 23:00 27/10/00, you wrote:
> >You wrote:
> >[talking about DNS as public space]
> > > decisions". We argued a little bit about the possibilities of claiming the
> > > name space as a public space in policies (for ccTLD etc.), what she said is
> > > that the ICANN board never wanted to get any trouble with any of the
> > > countries so they never did try to do anything in this direction.
> > >
> >
> >Browsing through documents published on the ICANN site I saw that the
> >concept of  "The DNS is public space" asserted by GAC has been used
> >affermatively by Louis Touton in answering to a letter claiming a 
> >copyright on
> >'.BIZ'  new gTLD proposal.
> >I think that this fact may be used, if needed, in order to have ICANN 
> >acting in
> >a consistent way on the issue of "DNS=public space".
> >
> >References:
> >http://www.icann.org/tlds/correspondence/biz.com-response-23oct00.htm
> >
> >Best regards
> >Giorgio Griffini
>