Hi Eric, On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 12:31:58PM -0800, Eric Brunner-Williams wrote:
nearly two decades of existence, observed that a public interest exists in access to numeric endpoint identifiers, and in access to mnemonic endpoint identifiers, unrestricted by region or language
I think you may be making my point for me. We can explain this behaviour without appeal to an ill-defined and practically untestable assertion of "the global public interest", and instead refer to more concrete problems that are squarely within the problem ICANN is designed to solve. For instance, access to the kinds of identifiers you mention increases the utility of the global Internet for more possibly-connected internets. We therefore don't need an appeal to difficult geopolitical categories when we can just say that, whatever the other interests are, unbiased access to these identifiers are good for interoperation on the Internet. This changes the matter from answering a question that is completely intractable into one that is at least constrained to a particular domain of discourse. Such a limit doesn't, of course, make all disputes go away. Does a larger number of delegations from the root zone improve interoperation on the Internet? Well, in one way yes and in another way no. But at least we can have a discussion that doesn't have to range across every possible dimension of (human?) experience. Not every problem is made easier by resort to levels of abstraction so large as to make astrophysics blush. I think there are legitimate policy questions to answer even in the restricted domain of discourse, and the answers to such questions may even change over time. Those are real questions for the entire ICANN community (or maybe community of communities) to answer. There is no reason to make the problems harder that that. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com