RE: [wg-c] Unofficial report on L.A. meeting

["Roeland M.J. Meyer" <rmeyer@mhsc.com>]

> Behalf Of Craig Simon
> Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 1999 6:34 AM

> 3.	What is to be done?
>
> Finally, I offered what I now call the "the principle of the
> more feasibly fixed
> fiasco." If and when new gTLDs are added, I believe it would
> be wiser to start
> with non-profit/cost-recovery gTLDs rather than proprietary gTLDs.
>
> The underlying presumption is that if either approach is
> later deemed to be
> mistaken, it would be easier to parcel off a non-profit
> registry (say, by
> auction) rather than to take the registry from a private
> owner. In short, the
> public resource blunder would be easier to fix than the
> proprietary blunder.

False and FUD, a taking is difficult, if not near impossible, regardless of
the profit/nonprofit status of the organization. Where do y'all get the idea
that this is otherwise? I know that Kent floored this first, he's wrong and
no one seems to notice. If you don't own the asset, you can't sell it to
anyone else. It's called theft, whether the legal owner is profit or
non-profit (commercial corp or Catholic Church) you can't just walk in and
take it from them. If you could, it would apply to both cases evenly. The
only difference is that the for-profit might afford bigger teeth to bite you
with. But, relative in-defensiveness doesn't make it morally right. Since
when did we become a society of thieves?

> The last four years of experience with NSI provides
> incontrovertible proof of
> how difficult it can be to get a powerful proprietary
> registry to modify its way
> of dealing with the Internet community.

They are an independent entity, like you are Craig. From a slightly
different perspective; you own a plot of non-covenanted land (you own it
free and clear, no conditions, no zoneing, no covenants, and it's paid-for)
and you start building a house, then some schmuck decides that they don't
like your house and start demanding changes. By pure happanstance, you
happen to like some of the changes yourself and incorporate them. After
completion, you decide that you'd like to rent one of the extra rooms out.
That same schmuck decides "Oh may Gawd, we can't have that person generating
revenue from their own house! Let's take it away from them because that
would be a blight on society." Now, take that same scenario and pretend that
you are a pastor and decided to house homeless people and this house is in
one of the "high-dollar" areas of your town. Would this change anything?
Absolutely not! A taking is a taking and it is still called theft. That
asset is still theirs and it is NOT yours.

Even in the presence of zoning ordinances and covenants, you still can't
just walk in and start selling parts of the house off without legal action
(much to the chagrin of many eco-nazis) and when that action is favorable
some compensation us ALWAYS granted to the original owner. In other words,
you ALWAYS pay for the privelege of taking that action. Whether the owner is
non-profit or for-profit is always considered irrelevant. This is current US
law and is well practiced and covered by much case law.