Excellent post, Craig. A few comments below: Craig Simon wrote: > Having monitored these discussions for > over 18 months, I have come to feel that the membership issue, while certainly > important for strengthening the legitimacy of decisions, is a sidetrack to > resolving the various resource allocation problems which are at the crux of this > debate. Agree completely. The debate is really about property rights--to names, the name space, and secondarily addresses. Had the USG understood the issue properly, it would have clarified questions of ownership and entry FIRST, and then privatized the administrative arrangements (i.e., the move from IANA to ICANN). What we've done instead is set up the administrative arrangements first without defining rights, creating a guild system in which entry into the market will be controlled by ICANN. Now we sit around and worry about how to make that guild "representative" and "transparent". Representation and transparency are important, but the possibility of abuse is dramatically increased by the fact that we are not getting the principles underlying the property structure right. Do we let a "representative" and "transparent" board decide whether I can set up an Internet Service Provider business? Imagine what would happen if we created the Federal Communications Commission first, and THEN let it pass the equivalent of the Communications Act. Membership on such an ass-backwards FCC would certainly be important, but struggles over membership would simply become a proxy for the real battles over who gets to enter what markets and how those markets are regulated. The whole game would become: capture the FCC, then write the rules. You can chalk all this up to the phony, poorly-conceived philosophy of "industry self-regulation." No, it is not a philosphy, it lacks the content to qualify for that term. As Magaziner used it, "industry self-regulation" was a slogan masquerading as a program. I am not pro-regulation (people who know me know that that is an understatement), but markets and private sectors exist in a context of property rights. When property rights are undefined, there is no stable basis for a private sector. Governments define and maintain property rights. In this case, the USG abdicated. We will pay for that mistake for a long time. In my capacity as a professional academic and historian of telecommunications, I am going to make sure that posterity understands just how badly the US Dept of Commerce has botched this thing. > But this obsession with structure also reflects the stalemate that has occurred > on the issue of shared versus proprietary TLDs. Debates regarding the most > crucial outstanding disputes are stuck. The energy of the participants has been > diverted into excesses of complexity. The current process being promoted by BCIS > is raising interesting questions about community, polity, and legitimate > authority on the Internet, while treading lightly on questions of longstanding > concern. Yes, shared vs proprietary TLDs is precisely the kind of property rights issue that the USG should have resolved, not left to ICANN. Even if it did not resolve it in the way I personally would have liked, it should have been resolved BEFORE creating ICANN. However, the ISOC faction must share a great deal of the blame for this blunder: first because of its attempt to self-privatize without any legal authority, and secondly because of its promotion of the mythology of "self-governance." The whole Internet community seems to have been blinded by this silly idea that the Internet somehow existed outside of civil society, makeing it possible for ISOC to promote the mistaken idea that the USG was "intervening" in a "self-governing" process. This rhetorical ploy was compounded by its later encouragement (exploitation?) of European political jealousies in order to counteract the USG's involvement. --MM __________________________________________________ To receive the digest version instead, send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To SUBSCRIBE forward this message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNSUBSCRIBE, forward this message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Problems/suggestions regarding this list? Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___END____________________________________________
