Re: Draft New Draft

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Wed, Feb 10, 1999 at 05:17:15PM -0500, Antony Van Couvering wrote:
> Kent,
> 
> Perhaps our disagreement here is one of emphasis, and/or of semantics.  I'm
> sure that Nominet runs with the implicit consent of the British Government.
> IANA worked with the implicit consent of the U.S. Government - and in fact
> the Government paid, directly or indirectly, most of its bills.
> 
> What does that mean functionally?  Does it mean that the British Government
> controls Nominet?  I don't think you'll get Willie Black to agree to that.
> Steinar Haug just pointed out that there is government involvement in the
> .NO domain.  I doubt that he'd agree that the Norwegian government controls
> the domain.

I'm not so sure about that.

Willie has stated in my presence that he knows that if the UK
government wants to assign .UK to some other registry there isn't a
damn thing Nominet can do about it.  In practice Willie knows, and 
we know, that the UK government isn't going to pull the plug on 
Nominet.  

I own my car, and in theory I could take a sledgehammer and in a
couple of hours reduce it to total junk.  We know I won't do that 
either.  In both cases, however, who really owns the item is not in 
question.  The UK "owns" .UK, and I own my car.

Now, if the UK government started making violent noises about 
Nominet, it might well be the case that ICANN would try to reason 
with them -- just as my neighbors might try to convince me that I 
my threats of taking a sledgehammer to my lemon was a little 
irrational.

The semantics of the "sovereignty" claim is that, in the final
analysis, the "owner" of the country code is the country that has
authority over it, as designated by ISO.  There are some messy end
cases -- that's life.  In practice the exercise of final authority 
has been and will remain rare.  That doesn't mean that it doesn't 
exist, though.

I've been thinking a bit about exactly what it is that the sovereign
"owns", and, as I mentioned once before, I think the fundamental
"property right" of the the sovereign is that it has a
protected intellectual property interest in its associated name(s). 
It may not have started out this way, but essentially by adverse
possession and political stength, this is the current reality.

Intrinsically this "right" doesn't translate to the equipment of the
registry, or the customer base or anything else except the right to
use the TLD name -- which, concretely, means the fundamental
ownership of the record in the root zone.

-- 
Kent Crispin, PAB Chair				"Do good, and you'll be
kent@songbird.com				lonesome." -- Mark Twain