Re: [wg-review] "ICANN has no legal authority"

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 12:46:52AM -0500, Sotiropoulos wrote:
> 1/31/01 7:30:30 PM, Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> wrote: 
> 
> >ICANN has no legal authority
> >or moral ligitimacy to exercise control over any company, organization
> >or person, except itself; ICANN has no "right" to regulate *anything*.
> 
> Point out ONE example of technical decisions that ICANN has made since
> its inception. 

The work of the group that studied the Y2K problem for the root
servers.... In fact the work of the root server advisory committee has 
dealt a great deal with technical operational issues.

Also, the old IANA functions are managed out of ICANN now -- assignment 
of port numbers, protocol numbers, etc.

> EVERYTHING ICANN has done to date is policy-oriented (UDRP, new TLDs
> etc,...)

Nope.

> Mr.  Kent Crispin, are you saying that all this "policy" is INVALID,

Nope.  Not at all.  I guess you missed it:  I'm not arguing against 
ICANN as it actually is; I'm arguing against the idea of converting 
ICANN into a governance frankenstein of monstrous proportions, which 
seems to be the prevailing sentiment in this WG.

All the policies you mention have been or will be implemented through
exactly the method I described: contracts.  ICANN has in fact for the
most part been working as I described; there is one distortion (and I
admit it is a very large one): the USG having prexisting contracts with
NSI does put registrars and NSI in a much weaker position relative to
ICANN.

That is, my description of ICANN assumes the desired long-term steady
state of no government involvement, except through the oversight of
anti-trust authorities. 

As far as the policies you mention:

The UDRP was arrived at through a process largely independent of 
ICANN: the WIPO proceedings that went on for a year, at least, involved 
thousands of stakeholders, multiple public hearings around the world, 
etc etc.  The WIPO effort was mandated by the USG in the White Paper -- 
it was not originated by ICANN at all.  And, contrary to opinion 
popular on this list, the UDRP is widely viewed as a great success.  
Milton Mueller's study points out that the number of UDRP cases 
relative to the number of domains registered is miniscule, and that 
most of the decisions are in fact reasonable.

And the fact that we have come as far as we have with new TLDs is 
something of a miracle, considering how unbelievably contentious the 
issue is, and the political power of some of those that oppose new 
TLDs.  That also has been the result of an enormous effort; WG-C was 
almost as bad as this one -- eventually restrictions on posting were 
instigated to minimize the volume. (People were restricted to 3 posts 
per day.)  WG-C came up with a recommendation that 6-10 new TLDs should 
be added, with a mix of competitive models.  ICANN followed that 
recommendation exactly...

[...]

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