Re: [ga] Karl's comments at the 2003 Senate hearings on allocation systems
Karl, I never thought I'd see the day you'd be lobbying on behalf of potential registry operators and registrars. I have *always* held the position that there should be no arbitrary, and particularly that there should be no non-technical barriers, denying anyone the ability to go out there into the domain name business, spend his/her money, and make either a ton of money or loose his/her shirt. I said it in my campaign platform back in 2000 - http://www.cavebear.com/icann-board/platform.htm#dnspol-tldpol You are mixing demand, demand that is focused because of TLD scarcity, into .com with the scarcity of TLDs itself. What you and some others seem to be promoting is a free-for-all which in the final analysis would end up hurting the little people No, what I am promoting is a system of the internet in which we honor the well learned lesson that highly regulated economic systems - and ICANN's approach to TLDs is one of those highly regulated economic systems - rarely work. who initially made a personality out of you and voted you onto the ICANN board. What you may have lost sight of is best embodied by that individual who showed up at the Vancouver meeting and spoke at the public meeting about how he depends on ICANN. That guy was weird - he was saying that he couldn't write code if ICANN were to vanish. Being a person who writes mountains of code, I can say categorically that he was one of those people who really don't understand ICANN's role. What you, and some others, are promoting is a wild west scenario I live in that Wild West - it was pretty wild around here (California in general and the Monterey bay in particular) in 1846. And that wildness resulted in a pretty good place. But getting back to the point - People are not harmed by choice. If some group of folks find that they can't cope, they can join AOL or one of the other walled gardens. By-the-way, DNS simply is not a taxonomic system. Period. The fact that it has been used by many to be one does not make it one nor does that use mean that it should be locked away and that others should be forbidden to try to make new uses of DNS. Your argument sounds to me like one that said that telephone wires, because they have been used to carry voice in the past, can not be used to carry data/DSL because that would confuse telephone users. 2. driving companies and individuals to multiple gTLD registrations where one would have sufficed; Ah the old fear, one pushed my many trademark lawyers, that if one does not register everywhere than one's mark will be lost. There is some validity to that concern, but it has not proven to be a valid fear. And I have long advocated a cure via an amendment to the US trademark laws to clearly indicate that a mark is not made weaker by failure to register in every TLD nor made stronger by such blanket registrations. By-the-way, it is the trademark holders who have refrained from supporting such a measure. So if they don't want to clarify their legal status, then I don't see any reason to force them to do so. 3. making it harder to implement any realistic oversight that would lead to ever greater potential for abuse, chicanery and/or corruption; There are plenty of laws on the books to deal with abuse, chicanery, and/or corruption. Adding more TLDs doesn't change the fact that fraud is fraud, that theft is theft, and extortion is extortion. What I am saying is that the honeymoon period of the DNS is over and some real work has to be done to properly establish standards. And if those standards go beyond the simple technical ability to run a TLD according to internet standards then you are imposing an economic and social policy regime that amounts to the making of a law. And as a general matter, at least here in the US, that's something for the legislatures to do, else it is simply restraint of trade which may itself be unlawful. Very nice for .ewe. I won't be registering one of your .ewe TLDS anytime soon, but I wish you the best of luck in promoting "competing roots". My measure of sucess for .ewe is whether it makes me happy not whether it gets millions of registrants. It is illegitimate for ICANN to judge whether .ewe should be admitted into the root zone based on my business plan. All ICANN should ask is whether I'm going to follow full internet standards (I am) and not operate in an unlawful manner (as measured by published statutes, and again, I am). The kind of mentality of a priori economic and marketplace engineering is completely at odds with a free an open marketplace and is instead a return to the kind of Five Year Plans found in the old USSR. Yet you are arguing that the internet, at least the DNS be run with the kind of heavy hand and central planning that was found in the USSR. Intrusive regulation also comes with another kind of gloss: Your arguments are also reminiscent of those of one of our great market manipulators and monopolists, J. D. Rockefeller, who argued that the petroleum industry, from top to bottom, should be free of competition because to have competition would be to create uncertaintly, would be to cause wasteful duplication, and would require consumers to make choices. It has long been the policy of most nations that while Rockefeller approach consitutes a restraint of trade, that the benefits articularted by Rockefeller do not outweight the damage caused by elevated prices, limited ranges of products, and lack of incentive to innovate. Those national policies still hold. ICANN has long acted contrary to those policies. ICANN is without a doubt a combination that acts to restrain trade. ICANN may be doing so unlawfully - indeed there are now some lawsuits asking that question. --karl--
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