Re: Draft New Draft

[Dr Eberhard W Lisse <el@linux.lisse.na>]

On Wed, 10 Feb 1999, Kent Crispin wrote:

> 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.

Who cares whether you are sure. Steinar Haug *KNOWS*.

> 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. 

We all know, that governments can do a lot of things. They can even do
illegal things. 

 
> 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.

Personally, I'd prefer if you took the sledgehammer and gave your
computer a good whack, in particular your modem. 

The UK does not own .UK. Nobody "owns" it. It is delegated by the IANA to
NOMINET under RFC1591. It is not delegated by the Crown to NOMINET.
 
> 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.


Whether a country has the muscle to intimidate its citizens, a registry,
ICANN or other governments is not the issue. ICANN/IANA has the root, they
delegate.  Whether it is practical, is another issue.

The UK is not a good example, because they have rule of law there. They
invented it in fact.

Take China, Indonesia, Mianmar, Zimbabwe for example. Those are the
examples. They lock people up for two year labour camps if they email
electronic addresses to critical organizations outside. They run rampage
in their illegally annexed colonies, they put Nobel Laureates under house
arrest for decades, their military detain journalists in contravention of
their own laws, torture them, and when presented with medical evidence to
the fact they say "He must have scracthed himself" and tell the judiciary
when they issue the equivalent of Habeas Corpus to go and perform an
unnatural act on themselves.

That's the kind of governments that we must prevent of controlling the
media. 

> 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.  

You don't know, as usual, what you are talking about. Like IANA ISO is not
in the business of defining what countries are, they are a standards
organization and define names for countries on requests of the member
states.

And whether an ISO identifier gives a country power over the corresponding
ccTLD is simply not the case. It has never been challenged in the courts.
In fact even the USGov contradicts itself on this one. 

> There are some messy end cases -- that's life.  

As long as one is not at the receiving end of it.


> In practice the exercise of final authority has been and will remain
> rare.  That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, though. 

Noncontributory.


> 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.

This is a 9 on the Kent-Meter. 


> 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.

Rubbish. (Is your glaucoma acting up again, Kent?)


I have read a very nice interview with Gore Vidal about the current
political state of affairs (:-)-O) in the US, he calls the US a police
state. Unfortunately it's in German (Der Spiegel from Monday this week) so
Kent can't read it... 

el