RE: Draft New Draft

["Antony Van Couvering" <avc@interport.net>]

Kent,

Thanks for the useful message.  Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that
Freedonia has an intellectual property right in the .FD TLD, because of
usage.  That's the argument you've made below, if I'm not mistaken -- that
because .FD has become associated with Freedonia through use of the DNS
addressing system, Freedonia now has become very clearly identified with
.FD, and therefore essentially "owns" it.

*IF* that were true, would these things follow?

a) NSI would therefore own .COM, .NET, and .ORG?

b) A registration by an individual or company in .FD could be revoked by the
Freedonian authorities on no basis other than their ownership?  Or are there
some limits to be placed on the Freedonian ownership?

Antony

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-domain-policy@open-rsc.org
> [mailto:owner-domain-policy@open-rsc.org]On Behalf Of Kent Crispin
> Sent: Thursday, February 11, 1999 2:24 AM
> To: domain-policy@open-rsc.org; discuss@dnso.org
> Subject: Re: Draft New Draft
>
>
> 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
>