[discuss] PASS THE SICK BAG!

["Antony Van Couvering" <avc@interport.net>]

Don, Jay,

Given the breathtakingly brazen stunts that NSI has pulled at the expense of
the Internet community, I never thought it would be possible for ICANN to
make them look like the aggrieved party.  But lo, it has come to pass.

This is getting sickening.  I've never seen so many people who were
completely right and never wrong as I've seen on these lists.  Are there any
independent voices out there?

Who can really feel sorry for NSI after all the crap they've pulled?
Practically no-one, I should think, except their employees.  But who can
support ICANN when they start censoring people?  Even fewer (since they have
fewer employees).

Will the people from the IAHC/gTLD-MoU (and remember, I was founding Chair
of PAB and spent a lot of time and effort to make that effort succeed), who
now seem to all think that ICANN is a conclave of the purest wisest Solomons
ever assembled, presumably because they are at present bashing NSI, never
realize that:

*The POC was a closed shop, a black box, unreadable and unknowable from the
outside, intransigent against efforts to open it up and see the
decision-making process

*Making everyone sign the gTLD-MoU before they got to play was an horrific
miscue and an affront to Internet stakeholders (hence my attempt to
introduce a very watered-down "gTLD-MoU lite", consisting of a few
unobjectionable principles - alas, to no effect).

*If the POC hadn't forced CORE to charge $10K to anyone who wanted to become
a registrar, which was done just to make sure that "unstable" people didn't
join, but instead had charged, say, $500, like Nominet does in the UK, we
wouldn't have had the Green Paper, the White Paper, or the ICANN, which is
starting to act just like POC, but with less excuse since they have already
seen that kind of thing fail.

*Basically, NSI did try to torpedo the gTLD-MoU, but that's not why it
failed.  It failed because it was so bloody-mindedly stupid, and so paranoid
about NSI that it started to act like NSI: paranoid, unaccountable,
mealy-mouthed.

*That it's just possible that NSI doesn't realize how horribly they've
treated everyone, that they actually think they're the good guys, and that
therefore they should be encouraged to become part of the community and stop
playing the spoiler.

*That the POC has mostly itself to blame for the Green Paper and the White
Paper and the plodding interference of the U.S. Government.  Do you think
Magaziner *wanted* to step into this minefield?  All you had to do was let a
few other people play with the ball, but you couldn't let yourself do it.

AND ON THE OTHER SIDE

Will the people who are NSI supporters - and most of them now admit they are
paid - stop acting the fool and admit that:

*Of course NSI did all it could to torpedo the gTLD-MoU, just as it is now
dragging its heels to fullest possible extent with ICANN.

*The only reason NSI plays at all in this sandbox is because the only
gorilla larger than it, the US Govt., is standing over it with a big stick.

*That having secret lists of names they won't register, that not following
the RFCs, that greeting every domain-name dispute with an army of lawyers,
that charging the equivalent of a new registration to transfer a name to new
registrar, that attempting to claim the whois database as their property,
that replacing the InterNIC site without any warning, that crippling whois
listings without any warning, and so on ad nauseum until we're all so sick
of it we can hardly breathe, IS NOT ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR.

*That NSI has mostly itself to blame for the Green Paper and the White Paper
and the plodding interference of the U.S. Govt.  Again, do you think that
Magaziner wanted to get in the middle of this thing?  I know, because I was
there, that almost any movement toward an accommodation with the gTLD-MoU
would have led to negotiations that might have got us somewhere.  But no.
Given .com years ago, in a different universe far far away, NSI has latched
on to it as if they actually earned it, which is truly laughable.

And so Adult Supervision was definitely indicated.  Hence the involvement of
the U.S. Government.  Unfortunately for all of us, the supervision, in the
form of ICANN, is proving to be as puerile and short-sighted as their
charges.

This was the Internet, this beautiful gift to us all, and just look at the
preposterous games these fools are playing with it, all these fools who are
always right, all the time.

PASS THE SICK BAG.