[icann-nominations] Nomination Acceptance - James Love

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

1. Full name of the nominee:  

     James Packard Love

2. E-mail address of the nominee: 

     love@cptech.org               

3. Organization you work for:

I am Director of the Consumer Project on Technology, a group
created by Ralph Nader, and an employee of the Center for Study
of Responsive Law.

4. Snail-mail address (street, city, country):

     P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036, USA

5. The region that includes the country of which you are a
citizen:

     North America

6. The region that includes the country in which you reside:

     North America

7. A clear statement of acceptance of the nomination:

     I accept the nomination to the ICANN board that was made by
     Dennis P. Schaefer.  


8.   If you are a Member of the Names Council, state your
     intention to resign from the Names Council if you are
     elected to the ICANN Board:

     I am not a member of the Names Council. 

9.   A Curriculum Vitae (no more than 500 words long):

     I have a personal web page on the Internet at
http://www.cptech.org/jamie, which provides additional background
information.

     I am the Director of the Consumer Project on Technology, and
I been an employee of the Center for Study of Responsive Law
since 1990.  For 1988 to 1990 I was Senior Economist for the
Frank Russell Company, a large pension fund consulting firm,
where I advised IBM, Shell, DEC and other clients on investments,
and worked on a team that created a portfolio reporting system
for IBM.  Before that I was Visiting Lecturer at Rutgers, where I
taught economics, and a research associate at Princeton
University.  I am "ABD" from Princeton in a program in Economics
and Public policy, but also have received a Masters in Public
Administration from Harvard in 1981, and a Masters in Public
Affairs at Princeton in 1985.  
                                   
     I participate in a number of civic affairs, and am currently
the co-chair of the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD)
Working Group on E-Commerce (http://www.tacd.org), as well as the
TACD subgroup on pharmaceuticals.  

     Lately my own work has focused mostly on electronic commerce
and access to medical technologies.  In both areas, I do a lot of
work on issues concerning intellectual property rights.  I work
in Washington, DC, but the majority of our work is international. 
CPT's work is extensively documented on the web at
http://www.cptech.org. 


10.  A statement indicating your ideas, intentions and/or the
     reason why you consider you should be elected to serve in
     the ICANN Board (no more than 500 words):


     I have written about ICANN from time to time, and much of
CPT's work on ICANN is on the web at:
http://www.cptech.org/ecom/icann/

     My brief statement regarding my "ideas, intentions and/or
the reason" for election is as follows.


a.   ICANN should not do very much.  It should not be a big
     bureaucracy, or seek to centralize power and authority over
     the Internet.  

b.   There is a danger that people will see ICANN as having such
     power, and seek to control ICANN in order to advance various
     agendas.  One can come to different judgements about the
     merits of various agendas, and still see that ICANN is ill
     suited to be a broad governance institution.

c.   Some want ICANN to be a tool to protect intellectual
     property.  I agree that it is important to protect
     intellectual property, subject to important public interest
     limitations and exceptions.  However, ICANN does not have
     the expertise or accountability be a global policy maker in
     the ever growing range of IPR issues that have or could be
     raised in ICANN forums.  ICANN responsibilities in this area
     should be limited and narrow. 

d.   The UDRP has performed useful services to trademark owners,
     but the process itself could be improved.  In particular,
     ICANN or WIPO needs to deal with the tendency of UDRP panels
     to ignore the public's rights in the areas of criticism,
     parody or association.  Domain names are part of speech, and
     the UDRP process should explicitly protect free speech. 
     There are also many UDRP decisions that have anticompetitive
     consequences, including those that give trademark owners
     improper control over generic names, or which undermine a
     firm's right to comparative marketing.  I have sent some
     comments on the UDRP to WIPO, in an August 11, 2000 letter,
     and will be sending some other comments in a few weeks.
     http://www.cptech.org/ecom/icann/wipo-rfc-aug11-2000.html

e.   ICANN should not require new TLD registries to sign
     contractual provisions or make other assurances that they
     will not participate in alternative root systems.  I am not
     aware of any evidence that such alternatives present
     problems for the Internet, and ICANN should avoid practices
     that will be seen as monopolistic or anticompetitive.

f.   The TLD space should be vastly expanded.  This will greatly
     reduce the pressure on the existing UDRP process.  There is
     no reason why there should be so few opportunities for
     various parties to use second level domain names that have
     such obvious multiple uses.  ICANN should not seek to micro-
     manage registry policies on the allocation of domain names. 
     ICANN's oversight should be limited to a narrow set of
     consumer protection and technical issues, including, for
     example, malfeasance (failures to maintain acceptable
     services), fraud or price gouging.

g.   The DNSO itself gives far too much weight to business
     interests.  Consumer interests should have a much greater
     role in the DNSO decision making process.  Individual domain
     name holders should have a separate constituency.  The non-
     commercial constituencies should not be a catch-all for all
     disenfranchised members of the public seeking a voice in the
     DNSO.  



-- 
=======================================================
James Love, Director           | http://www.cptech.org
Consumer Project on Technology | mailto:love@cptech.org 
P.O. Box 19367                 | voice: 1.202.387.8030
Washington, DC 20036           | fax:   1.202.234.5176
=======================================================

--
Election of the ICANN Board Director by the DNSO
Archives at http://www.dnso.org/clubpublic/icann-nominations/Arc00/maillist.html