Re: [registrars] Proposed Ballots

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>]

Michael,

My IETF WHOISFIX Bof hat is dated, but wearing it, and my jolly PROVREG EPP
and modest registrar chapeauxs, elimination of the Bulk WHOIS obligation is
an idea who's time has finally come.

[x] Yup.

Turning to the WIPO question, WIPO has never recognized Indigenous rights
in property, except through European constructs like patent and trademark.
For this reason, the Mashentucket Pequot Nation can't obtain "pequot.com"
by administrative means, nor the estate of Tashunke witko (Crazy Horse) or
the Rosebud Tribal Courts obtain "crazyhorse.com", to use two examples I
(and others) used in our presentations to ICANN, and WIPO, in 1999.

I am opposed to any expansion of the scope of the UDRP until the set of
defects inate to it are cured. Let me be very clear -- there are 1,100
Indian governments in the US and Canada, and until those governments have
standing under the UDRP to bring a claim for their actual, and "common"
governmental names, and the names they make an active defense of, citing
a claim of right arising from their legal codes, I'll vote against this,
and I ask other registrars do as well.

If the WIPO recommendation to expand the scope of the UDRP include country
names, the names and names and acronyms of International Intergovernmental
Organizations (IGOs), without reference to the status of Indian Nations in
North America, or elsewhere in the Americas, or Maori iwi and Aboriginal 
Tribes in New Zealand and Australia, is accepted by ICANN, ICANN will have
affirmed the claim that these polities are either not colonized, or not 
legitimate governments -- as ligitimate as the "national goverment" of my
personal favorites -- St. Pierre and Miquelon, or Pitcairn Island.

We don't need to do that. It doesn't advance our economic interests a wit
to do so.

It gets worse. If IGO's have standing under an expanded UDRP to mine the
existing allocations in the string-space, then non-IGOs that already are
in the string-space are going to be victims of hijacking. Is the Union of
British Columbia Indian Chiefs, or the Atlantic Policy Congress, or the
National Congress of American Indians, or the Assembly of First Nations,
or ... safe from an IGO seeking to expropriate their domain, under some
theory that "International Intergovernmental Organizations" trump any old
bunch of bedraggled chiefs, by divine or ICANN right?

We don't need to do that. It doesn't advance our economic interests a wit
to do so. There is more money to be made getting people into the dns than
in keeping them out.

[x] I support the statement as a formal position of the Registrar
Constituency;

I have to think about the third ballot, new TLDs. Anything Stuart Lynn
has proposed on the subject is possibly as brain-dead as anything Prof.
Meuller has also said on the subject.

I think jointly operating registrars and registries can become a more 
common, and non-monopoly or non-near-monopoly feature of the landscape,
but there are some self-inflicted wounds in both the SLA nonsense in the
ICANN boilerplate, and the pressure this constituency put on the sTLDs
which may have made their infancy also their end-of-life. These both go
directly to the operating cost and capitalization bogies, hence to our
margins.

[x] I'm undecided at present.

Cheers,
Eric