Re: [wg-c] Public trust?

[Milton Mueller <mueller@syr.edu>]

I enter this pissing contest because the issue of whether we
try to accommodate each others' views is fundamental to
the WG's, DNSO's and ICANN's success.

Dave Crocker wrote:

> AMR wrote:

> >The issue before us is whether we can accommodate
> >eachother's views.  I believe that can be easily
> >done.  What do you think?
>
> I would be interested to see how one "accommodates each other's views"
> concerning a disagreement about whether a thing has, or does not have, a
> particular attribute.

David, you are not an economist, although you occasionally play oneon the Net.
No one denies that the name space *could* be treated
as a private resource, if we wanted to. There is no objective "attribute"
that makes something into a "public trust." That is a political decision
societies make based on how they want to handle the resource in
question.


> The idea of compromise works well in general.  However it works poorly with
> respect to basic disagreements about basic concepts and paradigms.
> In these cases, it is not possible to "accommodate".
> Instead one must choose between them.

This is just wrong. Mixed models are the norm, everywhere we look
In land, there is public space, private space, and many variations
in between. Same goes for radio spectrum, riparian rights, anything
you care to name.

There is no "attribute" of "public-trust-ness" that either exists or does
not and which dictates how we handle a resource.

Some resources can be treated that way, if we think it benefits
us, others can be treated differently. Different pieces of the same
resource can be treated according to either paradigm.