Re: [ga] this is ICANN's legacy

[Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Roberto Gaetano wrote:
> Chris,
>
> Actually the Board never said that "there is absolutely no demand for 
> new TLDs". If you claim it has taken little concrete action to address 
> the issue, this is true.
> The real problem, the way I see it, that is risking to paralyse the 
> Board is not the "if", but the "how".

I disagree.  The real question, or rather the initial question, is this:

What gives ICANN the right to say who may and who may not try his or her 
hand at entering the DNS business place?

Anyone who sits in that role, that of being the gatekeeper to a 
marketplace, is restraining trade.  And in most countries restraint of 
trade is something that is strongly disfavored, and often, if certain 
conditions are met, is highly against the law.

Now, ICANN might have had an opportunity to say that it is restraining 
the DNS business marketplace for technical reasons.  But the opportunity 
for ICANN to make a believable claim in that regard ended years ago: 
ICANN has instead made it very clear that ICANN restrains trade based on 
ICANN's choices as to social, business, economic, and as we see from 
.xxx, moral policy.

I have run tests that demonstrate that we could have a root that 
contains tens of millions of names.  The real limit is not technical but 
rather the fact that larger databases mean larger room for human and 
mechanical error, not to mention the increased time to propagate changes 
should an emergency dissemination be required due to such an error.

But even we we but back by a thousandfold, we can see that we can easily 
have tens of thousands, and probably hundreds of thousands, of TLDs 
without the slightest risk of "instability".

ICANN, if one simply opens ones eyes to the reality, has become an 
instrumentality of certain industrial segments that simply do not find 
it in their interest to have more top level domains.

ICANN is very, very close to being at the wrong end of several seriously 
grounded anti-trust/restraint of trade legal actions.  Some think that 
perhaps it may survive such a claim - but they are asking the question 
only in the context of the United States.  ICANN is potentially going to 
have to answer that question over and over and over again in many 
different nations - and the chance of surviving unscathed through that 
full gauntlet is perhaps remote.

ICANN could have avoided this fix by adopting and closely hewing to 
neutral and technically well grounded principles.  But it has not done 
this:  ICANN has followed a highly erratic course that has no 
principles, much less any that are grounded in technical necessity.

		--karl--