RE: [ga] Interesting WIPO ruling re: NewZealand.biz

["Abel Wisman" <abel@able-towers.com>]

Slowly but surely WIPO and the IP constituency seem to gain ground on
making law, an exercise untill non to long ago solely done by
governments.

If you do not like a domain name in a TLD, you invoke a UDRP procedure,
and unless the defendant is brilliant, get it.

If you do not like a website you threaten the owner, or his/her ISP and
it will be taken down, often without any decent proof of authority or
valid reason.

It seems that we have to work with different laws on the internet from
real life or to put it less "unreal" on the internet the "brick and
mortar" laws do not exist.

Institutions, new or old take the law and bend it in any shape they
want, countries aiming to make the law on the internet "their" law and
thus preventing a "healthy" internet.

Everybody has become so engrossed in the fight for power that we do not
seem to see that we are stopping progress in a bad way.

The impossiblity of comparing the internet to a brick and mortar world
makes all institutions with some power in the brick and mortar world
fght like mad to gain even more advantage on the internet and where
tuition should be the keyword, powerstruggle has replaced it and stops
the growth of the internet.

The government of no country has the right to decide for every netizen
in the world, or are we to see a war of the worlds on the internet when
a Junta tries to gain control via a DoC of their own calling upon rules
laid out by f.i. WIPO

I do not claim to hold the answer to put a stop to this, but am aware
that making others, outside the GA, aware of this is becoming more and
more a prioroty.

The proposals for "new" Bylaws are making our room for maneuvering (if
they are accepted) smaller and smaller and reduce a large part of the
internet to the playing-ground of a few large companies and
institutions.

I do however still believe that working on those proposals and other
task-forces as well as discussing in this GA as the democratic way
forward and the ultimate solution to a runaway train that the process
seems to be.

Kind regards

Abel Wisman




-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ga-full@dnso.org [mailto:owner-ga-full@dnso.org] On Behalf
Of Karl Auerbach
Sent: 08 October 2002 23:37
To: Rodrigo Orenday Serrato
Cc: ga@dnso.org
Subject: RE: [ga] Interesting WIPO ruling re: NewZealand.biz


On Tue, 8 Oct 2002, Rodrigo  Orenday Serrato wrote:

> I strongly disagree; the naming of States is a matter of public 
> interest, which supersedes private interests in the DNS.

I'm not willing to agree to that.

Countries have ccTLDs to do with as they please.  That should be the
beginning and ending of their sovereign-related powers over names in
DNS.

Some countries may have sold their ccTLD name to a private concern.  For
example, the United States has done this.  If a country made a bad 
bargain, that's their concern, not ours.

Nations are, of course, free to exercise their national powers over DNS
related acts of people and entities that occur within their
jurisdictions.

As for "public interest" - I tend to prefer that "the public" say what
is in their interest and what is not.  Considering that ICANN is
banishing the public from ICANN's decision processes, I would say that
ICANN is not in a position to make any credible statement about what is
or what is not in the public interest.

> ccTLDs help individuals refer their websites...

The Internet is not the world wide web.  The internet is a much larger
entity in which the web is but one service out of many.  In addition,
please do not confuse URL's with domain names, the two systems are quite
different.

If one wishes to try to defend DNS as being some sort of global uniform 
name space, I suggest that one apply the following tests:

  - Location invarience: Do names have the same meaning no matter where 
uttered?

  - Client invarience: Do names have the same meaning no matter who
utters them.

  - Temporal invarience: Does the meaning of a name, once a meaning is
attached, remain unchanged with the passage of time?

If the answer to any of these questions is "no", then the naming system
is 
neither global nor uniform.

Content management systems have knocked out the first two kinds of 
invarience for DNS and DNS itself has never tried to meet the third
kind.

> ... but they are no DNS substitute for the name of a country

With internationalized DNS, one has to ask whether the ASCII forms are 
"the" name of a country.

		--karl--


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