Re: [ga] Verisign's NetSol's NextRegistrationRights and Snapnames

["Richard Henderson" <richardhenderson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

HelpMy concern is that ICANN - if it wanted to act responsibly - could build more precise safeguards into its agreements with registries, and construct a certain amount of enforcement by including sanctions for failure to adhere to those safeguards and the agreements themselves...

Just as in the case of Afilias, ICANN (a) could have challenged the process proposed for checking Sunrise applications (b) could have challenged Afilias when it registered names and accepted applications which were in breach of the agreements (i.e. those applications which failed to submit data in the 4 mandatory Trademark datafields)... (c) could have set up grounds for intervention when the Landrush applicants were robbed of their right to a chance of thousands of names (which they had paid for through scores of ICANN-accredited registrars)...

Of course, Afilias Director Robert Connelly resigned over what he called the "abomination" of the process, but ICANN could have pre-empted so many problems if it had written more precision and enforcement into its Agreements...

In the case of Verisign, it seems apparent that they are now acting unilaterally on a number of fronts, and ICANN has failed to keep them in check, by allowing far too much flexibility in their agreements...

ICANN's "Anything Goes" mentality - what Dan Halloran described as a "laissez faire" approach - has got us where we are, with Verisign etc doing what they want, and flying in the face of what many perceive to be appropriate...

Governance does not mean intervening with every minute customer relations problem that crops up, but it should involve principles, responsibility for consequences, and pre-empting problems which can be pre-empted...

Power without responsibility... hmmm... who's really got the power behind ICANN... ask the 5000 ordinary Iraqi squaddies who were bombed out of existence by cowardly attacks from above, in the name of WMDs that don't seem to have existed anyway (Hans Blix)...

Power without responsibility means "Anything goes if I can get away with it"... it's Worldcom and Enron and the mentality of ICANN, and it's the banal world assumptions of the American regime...

And if you raise serious concerns and questions (as I have repeatedly raised them with Dan Halloran) then you just ignore them if you can get away with it... now nearly 500 days and *still* Dan Halloran maintains his contemptuous silence over my public and supported concerns about the NewTLDs...

As for Verisign, it seems like "Anything Goes"... ICANN ignored the concerns of its constituencies... and Verisign continues to drift towards its monopolistic origins, which ICANN purported to prevent...

In the end, more and more people will look elsewhere for solutions, will root around the root, will turn to the UN or ITU, will ask the fundamental question:

If the Internet exists to serve all the people of the world, and if it is used by all the people of the world, and if it is a resource which all the world contribute towards, then WHY does just one nation (US) lay claim to its governance, through its feckless quango ICANN?

It's time to internationalize the governance of the DNS and the Internet, and make ICANN or a better replacement answerable to an international authority rather than just one country.

This is a serious viewpoint (and in democratic terms a cogent philosophical argument) which is being increasingly discussed in the world that actually exists beyond Marina del Rey.

yrs,

Richard H