Re: [wg-c] new TLDs

[Milton Mueller <mueller@syr.edu>]

Only someone completely innocent of international law, politics, industrial
organization and regulation could come up with this gem:

Kent Crispin wrote:

> The presumption is that some official
> organization ALREADY CHARGED with regulating international banking
> would apply to ICANN for a TLD, and they would be the ones delegated
> the job of enforcing the criteria, because THEY ALREADY HAVE THAT JOB
> IN ANOTHER ARENA.  They have already proven that they are immune to
> anti-trust action, by their existence, etc etc.

The fact that the banking industry has been intersecting with brokerage and
insurance industry for a decade, that industry boundaries are fluid and that,
particularly in the international arena, authority is almost always divided and
contested, doesn't phase him a bit.

Hey Kent, who is that organization (singular) "already charged with regulating
international banking"? It ought to be easy enough to come up with a name, no?

Did you mean IMF? WTO? SWIFT? the SEC? the US Federal Reserve or any one of
about 200 other central banks? the FDIC? the EC?

I liked Werner's attitude better. He suggested that we might want to give a
.bank TLD to anyone BUT current banking institutions, to help undermine their
monopoly. But Kent is consistently authoritarian, if nothing else. Even to the
point of imagining the existence of uniform international regulatory agencies
that don't exist.

Happy Holidays! I delegate all my extra messages over the next three days to
Eric Brunner -- I just installed Outlook and need to test the filters.

--MM