On Dec 11, 2007, at 10:52 AM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
Once upon a long time ago, Jon Postel specifically declined to issue ccTLDs to governments, only to groups representing users, on the theory that governments change, but the users are always here.
Arguably, the bureaucracy and institutions of government are more stable than the politicians _or_ the public advocates of the day...
There are over 200 ccTLDs, and you'd probably be surprised at the range of "stability." My understanding is that Postel's historic suspicion of governments was based on his fear that ccTLDs and their domain name registrations would become political prizes won and lost in political processes. Changing registration policies, or even the registrations themselves, with every election or coup is not a recipe for stable, predictable, end to end communications.
For better or worse, we must assume that the government in a democracy has a public mandate to make policy.
Funny thing about "democracy" is that almost all the countries of the world self-identify as a "democracy" but the majority are something far short of that. The Economist ranks "democracy" every year, and you can get a sense from this chart of some of the daily struggles our ALAC colleagues in other countries confront. http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/DEMOCRACY_INDEX_2007_v3.pdf Also, if you're willing to view governments as a surrogate for the public voice, then we ought to simply disband the ALAC and go home. ICANN's Government Advisory Committee would like nothing better. They've been saying for years that they are the voices of users. I read your post about the CADNA proposal from just a couple of days ago though, so I don't think you're quite willing to cede public policy to governments.
To me the issue still appears straightforward. The application for .berlin should proceed within ICANN as a gTLD application, and should succeed if there are no technical obstacles and the registry organizers fulfil their contract obligations. If the local government wants to (and has authority to) regulate or prohibit that activity then that is a local legal/political issue.
I agree with you. But this thread began with someone noting that the municipal government of Berlin has said something or other about .BERLIN. Dirk posted something to correct the record. Robert forwarded the post to this list, and you asked why it was relevant. I think it's relevant because the Board may decide to give some weight in the process to government input. It may not be a current action item, but it is well worth our time to read these posts and watch what happens. -- Bret Fausett (skype me at "lextext") smime.p7s is a digital signature http://www.imc.org/smime-pgpmime.html ------------------------------------