[Infowarrior] - more on ... Dyson: What’s in a Domain Name?

[Richard Forno]

Karl used to be an ICANN director and was a voice of reason on the Board and in subsequent public discussions about ICANN and DNS policy.  -- rick


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com>
> Date: August 25, 2011 5:49:57 PM EDT
> 
> 
> There is a subtle distinction that is often lost in these discussions about ICANN and top level domains.
> 
> I, personally, believe that there is a lot of hyperbole and balloon thinking about new top level domains, of any kind, cc, g, etc.  Buy why should my opinion matter enough to prevent other people from engaging in lawful activities?
> 
> The issue for me is not whether various people believe that TLD expansion will be profitable or useful to one group, another group, or everybody.
> 
> Rather, the issue for me is whether ICANN ought to have the authority to deny people the right to act on their beliefs, to risk their own capital, and to expend their own efforts.
> 
> We've tended to adopt the IETF/IAB notion of the internet as a place where a benevolent technocracy of enlightened techno kings can deny people from engaging in acts, otherwise lawful acts, that the benevolent lords think is unwise of contrary to the spirit of the internet as they personally perceive it.
> 
> These judgments regarding "the best use" of the internet are often wrapped as technical arguments which sometimes, maybe even often, start to wobble when one begins to question the foundational assumptions.
> 
> In the late 1960's there were efforts by the benevolent overlords of the internet of that era, the telephone network, to deny light and air to what they believed was the wrongheaded idea that data could be moved in the form of packets that are bounced around a network of routing nodes.  Fortunately that idea got some light and air and became the internet.
> 
> And an example of a policy wrapped as a technical argument occurred in the early 1950's with the Hush-a-Phone where AT&T and its captive regulatory body, the FCC, claimed, as a technical matter, that a passive plastic hand attached to a telephone mouthpiece would cause operators to go deaf, linemen to be jolted off of poles, and other forms of telephonic catastrophe to occur.  Of course, all that was false and merely served to provide cover for what was an attempt by AT&T to preserve its business model.
> 
> The idea of free and open internet innovation has somewhat ossified under the i-bodies (IETF, IAB, ISOC, ICANN) into something that to my view is rather similar to the images of common during the 1930's where technology, white and pure, free of dirty politics and craven motivations, would rule the world and make it the utopia.  That was the image of films such as "Things to Come" and books such as "Stranger in a Strange Land".
> 
> There are those of us who believe that ICANN's role should be that which was professed when it was created - the role of assuring technical stability, meaning that domain name query packets are efficiently, quickly, and accurately transformed into domain name response packets with no bias against any query source or query question.
> 
> Such a role would not engage in speculation about whether a TLD is "good" or "bad", or even whether the proponent is engaged in lawful activities (there are enough law enforcement bodies without the need to pin a badge onto ICANN.)  It would merely require that the proponent engage in broadly accepted and practiced, written, technical guidelines and standards regarding the operation of DNS servers.
> 
> But that is not where ICANN has gone.  And it is that straying that allows people to try to be a tail that wags the ICANN dog to coerce the uses of the internet into channels of their personal liking.
> 
>    --karl--
>