Out of the four pages of the ICANN letter, there are only a few sentences which are meaningful and responsive to the previous request, and those sentences are near the end of page 3, hidden after an unnecessary and mind-numbing 'description of ICANN' for the first two and a half pages, hidden like any deceitful news story which tries to hide substantial info near the end of an article but not at the very end. That is the first indication in my opinion that ICANN has something to hide in regards to its relationship with China. The argument of the letter is that ICANN's relationship with China is the same as any U.S. company, like Microsoft, so therefore there should be as much concern for ICANN's relationship with the Chinese government as there is for Microsoft operating in that country, and since there is no current concern for collusion between Microsoft and the Chinese government, there should be no concern in the case of ICANN post-transition either. The argument of the letter relies soley on that false equivalence, and therefore fails to explain the differences in responsibility, post-transition, between ICANN and a U.S. software company. The letter is manipulative as it spends nearly three pages descibing ICANN, and half a page wrapping up the one paragraph false argument neatly in a ribbon of 'nothing to see here'. Any letter which tries to manipulate the reader as I have herein described deserves further investigation in my opinion. Ron |
|
McTim / All (Sorry for the delay in the response. I was travelling.) So, you say that the problem is only in my head, and we can safely ignore all that I am proposing as a problem! Let me then produce some clear evidence of the problem, and see how you respond to it. You of course know that US authorities have been using US based registries to frequently seize domains, for all kinds of reasons. Dont tell me you dont! The first famous case was when the domain of a travel site based in an European country was seized for offering holidays in Cuba to a customer in another European country, because US entities are banned from commercial transactions with Cuba. Note that the transaction had nothing at all to do with anything US. But US authorities used the US registration of the registry to seize the website nonetheless. Next famous case was of the Spanish sports streaming website Rojadirecta whose legality had been tested in Spanish courts and it had been declared legal... But that mattered two hoots to US government agencies which used its US registration to seize it.... Later has been this case of a Canadian gambling site being seized similarly by US agencies. Earlier, wikileaks website had got seized. There have been many more cases of such domain name seizures by US authorities, quite often when the focus of the concerned companies was non US. Interesting, there have been court orders which transferred control over domain names of businesses to other, US, companies. All such legal enforcement by US agencies ( courts as well as executive agencies) has been got done through exercise of jurisdiction over US based registries, mostly Verisign controlling .com. Lets now move on to the times of thousands of gTLDs, made possible by the new gTLDs rounds, and every big business encouraged to, at least legitimately entitled to, have its own gTLD. What if the above non US companies, or similar ones like them, now take on gTLDs of their own, which they have a right to. What is the option now for US agencies if they mean to pursue similar enforcement acts as they did earlier. And there simply is no reason why they wont. Now, get this one thing clearly - for an US agency, there is absolutely no difference at all between a Verisign controlling .com registrations or an ICANN controlling gTLDs. *They are the same for them, US registered private entities, subject fully to US jurisdiction.* When they want, US agencies (courts and executive agencies) will similarly order ICANN, like they did earlier to Verisign, to take down the 'offending' gTLDs.... The logic is clear and simple, and irrefutable. Can anyone argue why and how they would not.... And that precisely is the problem that I have been positing, taking the very likely example of an Indian generic drug company, with a gTLD, falling foul of the US pharma industry's high Intellectual property aspirations and standards (which are not global). So, in the circumstances, the option for non US businesses is one of the two 1. They keep strictly on the right side of US law, even when their business does not have anything to do with the US. This amounts to a global enforcement of one country's law and jurisdiction, covering all kinds of areas. This is highly undemocratic, and not should not be acceptable to non US entities. 2. Non US companies play safe and do not take up new gTLDs. This amounts to a virtual denial of a key DNS service to non US companies. Which should be almost equally unacceptable. What is your response to this situation... If this is not a real problem for an organisation whose main task is to provide DNS services to the world, I dont see what would be a problem for it. And if this is not an issue for ALAC to address, whose main purpose should be to the serve the interests of more the peripheral groups on DNS related issues, I dont know what would be? Since I have put forth clear evidence and propositions logically ensuing from such evidence, I will very much appreciate clear and direct responses, to the issues I raise and the 'problem' I frame. parminder On Tuesday 29 March 2016 08:53 PM,
McTim wrote:
|