Re: [wg-review] Clarifications requested from BoD, Staff, NC,TC, Chair prior to co-Chair elections

["Milton Mueller" <Mueller@syr.edu>]

Now we have Kent Crispin, antitrust law expert! It's pretty humorous, but way too off-topic to pursue. I would encourage others on this list to discount what he  has to say on the topic pretty thoroughly. Just let's say the concept of a private corporation selling an "anti-trust shield product" without any special exemption from government would...uh...raise a few eyebrows at the Justice Department.

>>> "'Kent Crispin'" <kent@songbird.com> 01/09/01 08:02PM >>>

The real point is that many people have a completely mistaken idea about
the nature of ICANN -- they think it is some kind of government agency,
and judge it in those terms.  But it is not a government.  It is a
corporation.  

In fact, you would be better off thinking of it as a corporation that
offers products (coordination services and anti-trust shielding) to
governments, registries, ISPs, and so on.

The "anti-trust shield" product (if I may use that term) is the really
interesting one.  Central coordination of access to resources, if done
by industry itself, would immediately arouse the suspicion of government
regulators, because central control of those functions would be a pure
monopoly.  So ICANN offers to the registries (ccTLD, gTLD, and address
registries) a non-profit central coordination facility with processes
that provide fair allocation of these critical resources.  Governments, 
in turn, get the advantage that they only have one entity that they 
have to look at for anti-trust concerns: ICANN.

How does that fit in to the purpose of this WG? Simply this: the primary
customers of ICANN (in this model) are registries and governments, and
the primary customers are the ones for whom policy is developed, and a
large part of the design of ICANN's structure is to deal with that
reality.  Many people in this WG believe that oversight for ICANN comes
from "the people", and they are busily crafting structures for that
purpose.  But in fact, the true oversight for ICANN does not come from a
few hundred people on email lists; it comes from anti-trust authorities
in various governments.  

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain
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