Re: [ALSC-Forum] A query

[Karl Auerbach]

On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Kent Crispin wrote:

> 2) ICANN is not a government, and it doesn't have the fundamental
> regulatory mechanisms available to it that governments do.  The only
> mechanism it has is contracts, and contracts are enforced through
> adversary legal proceedings, where the better financed entity always
> has an advantage.

You can say that ICANN isn't a government until you are blue in the face.
But it won't change the fact that ICANN is quite the model of a government
- a 16th century arbitrary government based on concepts of fiat and the
technological equivalent of "divine right".

ICANN is indeed quite the model of government, albeit one designed by very
untalented amateurs who clearly never cracked a book on political science
or history.

ICANN has its lex-ICANNia (e.g.the UDRP) and its enforcement mechanisms.
You claim that just because these are rooted from contract and depend on
the sovereign force of another entity that ICANN isn't a government - but
that claim won't help you one bit when your domain name is yanked, or your
IP address space revoked, because of an decision based on the
contract-expressed law of the land of ICANN.

If contract base enforcement is fatal to the concept of government, then I
guess in your eyes the United States is not a government because it
enforces many of our civil liberties by imposing them by means of contract
terms?

And one has to remember why the ICANN tree of contracts occurred in the
first place - the United States is standing behind ICANN and willing to
jump at ICANN's command and do ICANN's bidding.  So those who wished to
engage in DNS business, or to hold DNS names were forced, by the power of
the United states, to enter into contracts with ICANN, and swollow
ICANN's terms, else forfeit the business or abandon one's name on the net.

And, if one needs additional proof of that ICANN is government - one need
only look at ICANN's amazingly bloated bureaucracy.  ;-)

So let's drop the ICANN isn't government nonesense - you lost that one
years ago - and let's simply get on with building the democratic
institutions that we need to govern the Internet.

> The idea that ICANN should be a enormous worldwide psuedo government
> is simply braindead.

Glad you think so - that's what I said years ago in my Green Paper
comments ( http://www.cavebear.com/nsf-dns/ntia-comments.html ).  I'm one
who believes that governments are instituted for many good reasons - the
preamble of the US Constitution does a pretty good job of enumerating
these reasons - and that governments are the best method to handle jobs
such as those that have been placed on ICANN.  I'm happy to use our
existing national governments to benefit the public and citizens of those
nations - I don't see why we needed to build this new one.

But the creation was done, and done with your hearty support.

So, we have ended up with this new government called ICANN.  This new
thing unfortunately happens to resemble a government from the 16th century
- arbitrary, closed, capricious - and bears virtually none of the
principles of due process, accountability, and self-determination that are
found in governments of the 20th or 21st century

Those of use who are pushing for a strong ALSC are trying to repair that
very ill-designed government called ICANN.  It wasn't necessarily our
feeling that it should have been created in the first place, but given the
fact that it is here now, we have a choice: fix it or abandon it.  I, and
many others, are trying to follow the former course.

		--karl--