RE: [icann-europe] .kids or .kids.us?

[Roeland Meyer <rmeyer@mhsc.com>]

> From: Vittorio Bertola [mailto:vb@vitaminic.net]
> Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2001 8:53 AM
> 
> On Fri, 6 Jul 2001 07:24:23 -0700 , you wrote:
> 
> >If, in addition, the EU decides to operate their own 
> root-zone service,
> >including EU when ICANN wont, then ICANN power will be 
> broken in Europa. We
> >will then have three major players; ICANN, NewNet, and EU. From my
> >perspective, this is not such a terrible circumstance.
> 
> To me, all this discussion makes just one thing evident: 
> ICANN will never be
> able to maintain its "monopoly" (if you wish to call it like 
> this - from a
> certain point of view, any Parliament is a "monopoly" :-) ) 

That is an interesting point, but from an incorrect perspective. Yes, to the
blade of grass, cows, sheep, and horses are indistinguishable. The grass
still gets eaten. To the average consumer, there is a similar result, their
lives are ruled equally, by church, state, monopolies, etc. There is thus no
difference between the actors. However, from the ideological perspective,
there is a fundimental difference between monopolies and governments. This
mainly centers around consent of the governed. 

Most of us actually give our respective governments consent to rule our
lives, in one fashion or another. None of us actually gave any monopoly that
consent, in a strict sense. Parliaments also exclusively own the "force of
arms" option that we specifically prohibit monopolies from using. Most of
us, as citizens of nations, actually have some sort of voice, however small,
in certain aspects of how that nation is run. However, unless we are
shareholders in the monopoly, none of us have any voice on how the monopoly
is run. This is a small but fundimental difference. Further, what is
certainly not allowed, universally, is to have our national powers usurped
by a monopoly. Especially, one largely controlled by another nation. This is
why we pass anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws.

> It is absolutely astonishing to me that ICANN Directors, rather
> than understanding this and trying to gain as much
> openness and representativeness as possible, try to restrict 
> their founding basis to US DoC plus a narrow set of current TLD and 
> technical resource managers - as this is the very point that makes
competing 
> initiatives such as new.net legitimate.

This is the essence of my point. Given that we are going there anyway, EU
had better get in the game now. Slow and deliberate investigations often
make you miss the window of opportunity. The more kinetic energy that ICANN
accumulates, the harder it will be to do something about them later. Even
the nation-states of EU cannot touch ICANN directly, as it is. They have no
legal jurisdiction in California, nor in the US. Nor do they have any real
impact on the USG DOC. It is high-time that this little fact is recognised.
If EU wants to control its own destiny at all, in any fashion whatsoever, it
must address this issue and NOW is the time to do so.

> I personally agree that, if ICANN cannot be a representative 
> body, the end of the story you mentioned is perhaps the best one. I would 
> rather have my DNS governed by the European Union than by a
> closed and elitaire body strictly connected to the US government
> and a set of big commercial domain businesses. I would even put
> my effort to make this happen.

It seems that we are not far apart. As a concerned US citizen, I would
rather not see the United States become the one-world governing body. It
would not be healthy for the US and it would be the death-knell for liberty,
IMHO. The US needs significant competition, in order to remain sane. The
demise of the Soviet Union was, IMHO, not so good, from that perspective.
The SU kept certain US tendencies in check. RU is not as credible. It is my
personal hope that EU can effectly take that role. Competition improves the
breed and a strong EU puts us back into a multi-way race, on both political
and commercial grounds. It is not the finish line that is important, it is
the race itself. Now if we can just arrange for the finish-line to keep
moving down range.

> So I guess that we still have to wait for the end of the At 
> Large Study. If it ends up in a reduction of the weight of the At Large 
> membership, I guess that many of us who put our effort in ICANN At Large
should 
> and will shift to making ICANN lose its power, at least in Europe. And
even 
> if we didn't do it, the market or the governments would.

I submit that the main purpose, of the AtLarge study, is to immobilize those
who think just like you. By the time the study is completed it will be too
late to do something about the ICANN. By then, ICANN will be firmly
entrenched. They could even completely revoke the AtLArge and there would be
nothing anyone could do about it.


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