On 5/10/09 6:27 PM, "Evan Leibovitch" <evan@telly.org> wrote:
No, it is the difference between the official government -- you know, the one that prints money, staffs embassies, provides social services and makes the laws -- and a vaguely-defined, easily gamed, self-appointed set of experts that have, amongst their ranks, self-interested businesses and individuals that by and large represent Internet suppliers rather than end-users.
It is presumptuous and meddling of ICANN to determine that any body within a country has equal decision-making authority to the sovereign government of that country, or that an impass between them may allows the status quo to continue in contravention of sovereign law or regulation.
Hang on a moment. We are not talking about the situation where a country has a specific law on the books. In such cases, the government has the remedies available to it within the country to enforce those laws. The reason for the requirement that the sponsoring organisation and administrative contact to be in the country is precisely so they are bound under local law. They are not the kind of requests that are disputed. We are talking about the situation where some element of a government is expressing opinion on how the domain should be run. (As a side note, often governments are not cohesive and ICANN receives conflicting requests from different parts of the government.)
ICANN has erred -- seriously -- in identifying an "Internet community" as being distinct from the general public when it comes to policy making. In most
s/general public/government/, no? Or are you saying the general public is equal to the government?
Can you imagine the absolute outrage that would ensue if ICANN adopted the same approach towards trademark squatters? "We will allow the status quo to stand until the domain owners work it out with the name owners". Yeah, right. If anything, the trademark lobby is pushing for even more draconian, faster takedowns than before. Yet for ccTLDs, "they gotta work it out". What a joke.
Most people seem to agree that ccTLD disputes are to be sorted out in the country.
Not all other factors. As I said, technical stability and security is ICANN's mandate, and it should disallow transferral of a ccTLD to a technically incompetent or unstable entity. But beyond that -- yeah, to hell with othert factors. From where did ICANN attain authority to determine what "other factors" -- beyond its ONLY mandate of technical "safety and security" -- matter?
The only things we check for are directly from that IANA principles that pre-date ICANN. ICANN hasn't added anything new to the mix that I am aware of, and practically all the criteria staff ask an applicant to talk to are direct cites from RFC 1591, published in 1994.
Anything beyond simply fulfilling government requests (save for the technical issues) is inappropriate meddling. It is not getting in the middle to have a policy that simply says "a sovereighn country is also and always sovereign over its ccTLD".
I think that is perfectly valid input if you want the policy to be that. Like I said the ccNSO intends to work on the issue soon.
In today's world, that is grotequely bad policy, and ICANN long ago abandoned it regarding disputes over second-level domains. Some folks here appear to worship Jon Postel, but if that was his point of view (wrt government claims to ccTLDs) I'd contend that it has done a lot of damage to the Net (and ICANN). Quoting him does not make the policy any less grotesque.
I am just noting that ICANN has inherited a set of principles which is what we perform our research against today. There has never been a PDP to formally set anything to supersede current practice, but it appears that may be about to change. kim