Re: [council] Draft Names Council motion on IDN

["Milton Mueller" <Mueller@syr.edu>]

Elisabeth and other Councillors:

I cannot support this resolution.

It is asking private industry to wait for
a standards-making process to complete 
its work before offering services. 
Superficially, that seems reasonable.
In reality, it is impractical and
dangerous, for three reasons:

First, we are not fooling anyone - ICANN has
no governmental authority to prevent 
businesses from offering services that are legal
under domestic and international laws. Even
less does it have the authority to tell national
governments that operate ccTLDs, such as
China, when and how to introduce IDNs.

Second, it should be up to consumers and suppliers,
interacting in a marketplace, to decide whether
to wait or not. Obviously, there are tremendous
advantages to following a universally agreed-upon
standard. Suppliers know this, many consumers 
know it. The market value of an unstandardized
IDN is very low. So everyone has an incentive
to cooperate. If universal cooperation proves to
be not feasible in a reasonable period of time,
then it should be ok to move ahead.

Third, the consensus required to establish and 
adopt a standard is not something that can be
created by decree. Standards happen when the
industry is ready to agree on a standard. Attempts
to suppress alternatives and impose standards by
fiat simply don't work, and threaten competition
and innovation in the affected industry.

The situation is quite analogous to the existence
of competing standards in mobile communications.
You can say to the wireless equipment and service
suppliers: wait until there is a common global
standard for 3rd generation wireless systems
before developing any new services or 
equipment. But if the standardization process
bogs down, or if some suppliers come up with
innovations that give them a competitive advantage,
the market will evolve independently. It doesn't
matter what the ITU says.

The tension between standardization and 
innovation/ competition is a complex problem.
This resolution shows no appreciation of 
those complexities. It is yet another
example of ICANN's amateurism as an
aspiring economic regulator.

--Milton Mueller