Re: [IFWP] ICANN neo-colonialism

[Nigel <nigel@roberts.co.uk>]

> The CIA World Factbook
> (http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/tk.html) lists the Turks and
> Caicos Islands as a "dependent territory of the UK".  

In that case the CIA fact book is slightly out of date.  There is no
longer 
any such thing as "British Dependent Territory".  

TC is a 'British Overseas Territory'. (Just FYI in the first few months
of 
the UK Labour Governemnt which was elected on May 1, 1997, the UK
conducted a welcome rationalisation of the way it dealt with those
territories which are outside the British Isles.) Again, just, FYI, Hong
Kong was the last British Colony. 

The use of the term colony has been deprecated for years /especially by
the colonised/. 

> any objective stanard, that makes it a "colony".

Nonsense. Are the various possessions of the US to be regarded as
colonies?  


> Sean Jackson lives in Cambridge, England (see
> http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois?SJ1107), so the Turks
> and Caicos islands are not "his country".  

So? 

Self-evidently, Mr Jackson, (who though I have met, have no other
connection with) happens to be Technical Contact for the TC domain. 

This is perfectly permissible, and was even expected "in order to get
networking started . . ". [By the way, who was the Technical Contact for
.UM?? 
Hint: see http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois?um8-dom
Your "colonies" were clearly not his country, either]

> the legitimacy of any claim he may have made to be a representative of the
> T&C government.

Whether or not Mr Jackson has been accredited by the Government of Turks
and Caicos to attend in Berlin as an /observer/ on their behalf must be 
a matter or record. He either has been or has not been. I expect he
has had a letter saying so.

Futile barrack room lawyer debate on public mailing lists is like
teaching a 
goat to sing. It doesn't get you anywhere and irritates everyone around
you.

It must be remembered that ICANN or any of its committees -- even the
GAC
-- is not (yet?) an intergovernmental organisation. It is a private
company, 
operating an international non-profit organisation and under a
requirement 
by the White Paper process to be open,inclusive and transparent.

I fail to see how excluding /any/ observers from anywhere meets that
requirement. 

Doing so is of little practical value anyway, since a number of
countries (Scandinavia 
as one possible example) extend extremely wide ranging Freedom of
Information rights 
to their citizens so it will all end up in the public domain anyway, as
would all the
relevant correspondence.