Re: [ga] Who can't be an icann registrar?
Konrad Brandt wrote: Can someone who has been banned for life by the US Federal Trade Commission own and operate an icann registrar? Unless there is a US Federal law that imposes the decisions of the FTC onto nominally private bodies, such as ICANN, then the FTC's decision has no effect on ICANN. Moreover, in the US, corporations are considered legal people - two different corporations are usually considered separate even if they have the same shareholders. This same kind of legal fiction about corporations tends to exist in many, perhaps most, countries. So in answer to your question - Even people who have done bad things can become ICANN registrars. Doesn't icann perform a background check on new registrars?
Should ICANN be a consumer protection agency? Or should ICANN simply be a gatekeeper to ensure that registries and registrars adhere to minimal compliance with *technical* mandates necessary to preserve the *technical* stability while leaving compliance to the requirements of law to the law creation and law enforcement mechanisms of the various countries? Indeed, ICANN is already at risk as a combination in restraint of trade. Would it be wise for ICANN to increase that risk by denying someone a livelihood because that person does not pass ICANN's private standards of conduct? Some may be tempted to take the road of vigilantism, history has taught us that it is a dangerous road. Were ICANN a properly empowered, properly chartered, and properly overseen governmental body, operating under well defined and practiced rules of transparency, openness, and accountability, and with a mandated requirement to listen to the public and honor those concerns then yes, ICANN could then, perhaps with relative safety, go into the kind of background histories. But absent that kind of structure, and we know that ICANN is far from that structure, it is probably not wise for us to want to vest even further authority into ICANN. --karl--
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