Re: [ALSC-Forum] A query

[Kent Crispin]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2001 at 11:30:54AM +0200, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Aug 2001 10:23:47 -0700, you wrote:
> 
> >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" (*).
> 
> For me, as long as any member of the collectivity is free to register itself
> and vote without entry barriers, the membership is representative of the
> whole collectivity.

In that case, the at-large can never be representative, because there 
are intrinsic practical limitations that will restrict the ability 
of affected parties to participate.  This is true for any situation 
where the effort required to participate far exceeds the utility of 
participating, and that is certainly true for ICANN.

> In no elections the voting body is composed by 100% of
> the potential voters. As we are talking about a very specific and low-level
> issue, as you say, it is reasonable to think that only persons that care
> about their interests in it will participate

If a body has a very restricted mandate, like ICANN, then only those who
are directly and materially affected by that mandate will be strongly
motivated to participate.  In the ICANN case, the entities that are
strongly motivated to participate are registry and trademark/business
interests.  The rest of the potential interest groups in fact have
miniscule participation, from a percentage perspective.  The reason they
have miniscule participation is because ICANN has a very tiny impact on
their activities.  This is certainly true for individual members; the
only reasons we had as many at-large members as we did was because of
primarily media hype about ICANN as the "government of the Internet",
and, partially as a result of the first factor, nationalistic endeavors
to be sure that a particular national interest was "represented" in the 
new "government of the Internet".

[...]

> I think that ICANN should put a higher effort in get the At Large membership
> advertised, and that in next elections we should aim in having 10 or 100
> times more voters than in the past one, and that a higher number of members
> will make "capture" much more difficult and results much more meaningful.
> But I don't think we have to get even 10% of the Internet users in ICANN to
> make it work.

An at-large membership of 10 million would be completely chaotic, and 
incapable of any meaningful action whatsoever.  Moreover, the expense 
of even attempting to manage such an organization would utterly dwarf 
any possible economic effect that ICANN would have.  It is simply 
insane to spend $100 to make a decision about a $1 item.

[...]

> >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?
> 
> Because they are inadequate to do so due to their geographical limitation.

Sorry, that doesn't follow at all.

> All other industries' actions take place in a physical location - so my
> government can regulate car production and sales in my country, the nearby
> country can establish a different regulation, and the two can coexist
> without problems. But you cannot do this on the Internet. The UK subsidiary
> of my company sells music in Ireland through a server in the US and a
> payment gateway in Italy. How in the hell do you regulate this on a
> per-country basis?

See last weeks Economist (Aug 11), two articles:

1. Putting it in its place
The Internet is perceived as being everywhere, all at once. But geography
matters in the networked world, and now more than ever

2. The Internet's new borders
Geographical lines and locations are increasingly 
being imposed on the Internet. Is this good or bad?

[
This is from http://economist.com/search/search.cfm?qr=internet+regulation&area=1&cb=46&Submit2=Go
Unfortunately, it these are not free articles.
]

> It is the same with the DNS: if the Italian government
> decides that the registration of yourname.anything should be reserved to
> you, do you actually think that the US registries will care about it? And
> what if I then form a company in Switzerland to register it, so that I can
> escape Italian law?

Yes, these are the tired old examples.  But that's simply not the way 
things are going in the real world.

[...]

> >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.
> 
> Here in Italy, many years ago, there was a non-profit association called
> "Metro Olografix" - from the "Neuromancer" book. They were happily running
> their site at www.metro.it. Then, when the Internet boom started, a chain of
> supermarkets named "Metro" claimed the right to that domain name. The
> association was not harming the supermarkets' business in any way, but
> nevertheless, they could not afford a legal battle - so they gave the domain
> up and started again at olografix.org. But their traffic obviously dropped,
> and it took some time for them to get known again with the new URL. With
> this simple method you can make it very difficult for anyone to get a
> significant audience to their site. And this is only one possible example.


1) "avoiding a legal battle" is something that happens in the legal 
system, not the UDRP, and the reason that one avoids a legal battle is 
to avoid the cost, because the legal system is expensive.

2) in fact, it is quite possible that they would have won a UDRP 
action, for much less money than going to court.

3) Your example has nothing to do with ICANN or your freedom of speech 
(which was what I asked).

4) There is no a priori reason that "metro" would be a better domain 
name for the purpose than "olografix", nor is there any reason to 
suppose that the name would have any significant impact on the 
popularity of the site.

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