Re: [ALSC-Forum] A query

[Kent Crispin]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 05:48:44PM +0200, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
> On Sun, 19 Aug 2001 17:42:23 -0700, you wrote:
> 
> >> Now, even if single parts of the Internet are private and for-profit,
> >
> >Not "single parts".  Almost all.
> 
> Doesn't matter. The sum of single private properties is a public good,
> exactly like the sum of your own land and my own land and all other people's
> pieces of land makes up the nation's territory. Most countries of the world
> implement the concept of "private property" (some others, to be honest,
> outlaw it), but this does not mean that the collectivity does not have the
> right to regulate it, and even to take it away from you, in some cases.

That's a nice political abstraction that has very little to do with the
reality we are dealing with.  The ICANN at-large does not come anywhere
near being "the collectivity", and it has no realistic prospects of
doing so, for reasons I will discuss a bit below.  The at-large 
represents something like 0.01% of what we might reasonably call the 
"collectivity" (*).

Across the bay from me is the City of San Francisco, which is physically
composed of thousands of individual plots land owned by a whole variety
of entities.  Let's suppose that an ad-hoc group of activists consisting
of 1% of the land owners of San Francisco voted themselves the power
to regulate land, to levy taxes, and so on, all as a private initiative,
independent of the real government.  That would be a hundred times 
better representation of the "collectivity" than the current at-large.

On the other hand, let's suppose that we did get a really representative
at-large election -- let's suppose that we got say 50% of the
"collectivity" to vote.  That would be approximately 150 million people. 
Just mailing costs alone for a SINGLE letter to 150 million people is on
the order of $100,000,000 dollars.  The total administrative costs for 
running a truly representative election would be astronomical.

[...]

> >interest through the operation of a free market?  In the case of ICANN 
> >in particular, you are advocating creation of a gigantic international 
> >regulatory structure without considering at all the question of whether 
> >what is being regulated merits that infrastructure.
> 
> I'll consider it now, then. I think that the Internet is and will be more
> and more a crucial part of the way our society develops its future.

Of course, but ICANN doesn't regulate the Internet.  It deals with a 
very small part of the Internet, a low-level part that most people 
simply don't deal with.

> It will
> replace television as the main world media, just as television replaced
> radio and radio replaced newspapers.

You know, I have a radio, and I read a newspaper, and I bet you do too 
:-) 

> Now, for the aforementioned reasons I
> think that preventing any powerful economical lobby from gaining its control
> simply by throwing money at the problem is necessary to prevent our society
> from becoming an Orwellian one. I don't want communism and I don't want a
> gigantic bureaucracy. 

I'm sorry, but yes you do want a gigantic bureaucracy.  Moreover, you 
haven't given any reason at all why we need one.  Why is it that 
current governments can't regulate ICANN and the registries, just like 
they regulate every other industry?  The auto industry doesn't have an 
at-large mechanism where we have world wide elections to elect board 
members for a tiny non-profit that is supposed to regulate the auto 
industry, does it?  The pharmaceutical industry doesn't have it's 
at-large to elect a board to regulate the pharmaceutical industry.  We 
depend on governments to do that; we don't have to invent yet another 
government to do it.

> But I want to be granted my freedom of speech.

Could you tell me how ICANN is interfering with your freedom of speech?  
Rhetorical question of course -- it's absolutely obvious that ICANN is 
not interfering with your freedom of speech.  Maybe you could construct 
a hypothetical case where somehow ICANN *could* interefere with your 
freedom of speech?  And even if that were the case, why wouldn't you 
complain through your government?

> I want
> to be able to say that a given product sucks without seeing my domain taken
> away with an UDRP.

You can.

>I want to be able to put up a site that anyone in the
> world can visit, without having to choose second hand names because all the
> first hand ones are being exploited for money.

Sorry, that is an implicit contradiction.  If your view of what is a 
first class name is widely shared, then the name will be valuable.  
There is no avoiding that.

> I want to be free to use my
> e-mail without being harassed by tons of advertising. All of this requires
> regulation. In fact, any civil society needs regulation - the political
> system without regulation is called anarchy, or the jungle law. 

Right.  Go to your government.  That's what they are for.  That isn't 
what ICANN is for.

> And I don't even want a cyber-feudalism such as "this is my little piece of
> the network, and I am the absolute ruler of it, so if you don't like me,
> f*** you and go away". This could work in the early years of the Internet,
> in a naive and homogeneous environment. Applied to large scale, it would
> bring us back to the Middle Ages.

Whatever.

[...]


(*) "Assuming that the electorate were to be limited to individuals who
are regular users of the Internet, which was a registration requirement
of the 2000 election by virtue of the fact that a valid email address
was required in addition to a valid postal address, then the worldwide
number of Internet users is currently estimated by various sources at
350 million to 450 million and growing by 50 million to 100 million per
year.  Industry experts are quoted frequently in the press that there
will be one billion users by 2005.  The number of At Large registrants
who actually activated their voter registration in the 2000 election,
76,183, is approximately 2/100ths of a percent of the potential
electorate if the lowest projection - 350 million - is used.  The number
of actual votes, 34,035, is equal to 1/100ths of a percent.  These are
not numbers which meet any test related to democratic legislative
elections." -- from http://atlargestudy.org/roberts_paper.html

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain