Very well thought out and worded letter Michael.
Hopefully it won't go unnoticed.
On Tue, 13 Jul 1999 01:17:42 -0400, Michael Sondow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>Dear Senator Reid,
>
>Mr. Robert Connelly, a member of CORE, wrote to you recently
>claiming that ICANN, the organization poised to take over control of
>the Internet infrastructure, is a benign and community
>consensus-founded entity whose only opposition comes from Network
>Solutions, Inc., the company has had monopoly control of the
>Internet A root server. Mr. Connelly's statements in his letter to
>you misrepresent the situation.
>
>Contrary to what Mr. Connelly claims, ICANN is not a product of
>Internet community consensus. It was created and is dominated by
>CORE and its ally the Internet Society. CORE is a special interest
>group of a few Internet registrars that has been trying to gain
>unmerited power over the Internet infrastructure since 1996, and has
>succeeded in capturing the domain name policy committees of ICANN.
>Indeed, the unelected ICANN board was put in place by CORE and ISOC,
>displacing the Internet consensus process begun last year by the
>Department of Commerce. ICANN is CORE's creature.
>
>Network Solutions is far from the only entity in opposition to
>ICANN. All those who have been displaced and brushed aside by CORE
>and ISOC oppose ICANN, including the end-users of the Internet, who
>have been excluded from ICANN's councils. There is no user
>representation in ICANN, yet ICANN is making policy that will affect
>us adversely. We were promised an equal place in Internet governence
>by the DOC's White Paper, but CORE and ISOC, through their creature
>ICANN, have denied us our promised place.
>
>Representative Tom Bliley has begun investigating ICANN because of
>the myriad complaints about ICANN's lack of democratic process, its
>favoritism of special interests, and its anti-user policies. Mr.
>Bliley is rightly concerned that the changes underway in Internet
>governance do not result in restraints on free enterprise and free
>trade, dangers which are sure to come to pass if ICANN in its
>present form is permitted to continue its unpopular policies. An
>ICANN monopoly is no less inimical to the well-being of the Internet
>than a continuation of the NSI monopoly, probably more so, since
>ICANN has arrogated to itself powers of regulation that NSI never
>dreamed of exerting, for example making domain name registrants
>financially liable for the litigation of registrars and registries,
>and a tax on domain names, to mention just two of ICANN's anti-user
>regulations.
>
>Representative Bliley's Commerce Committee is not the only part of
>the government concerned with what ICANN has become. The Department
>of Justice is scrutinizing ICANN closely because ICANN is acting in
>ways that make it a target of the anti-trust laws. A private
>corporation like ICANN, whose domain name policy-making committees
>are dominated by such special interests as CORE and ISOC, may be
>illegally regulating commerce, and it has no legislative mandate to
>do so, nor could it have, as there are federal laws that prohibit
>this. The anti-user domain name policies that ICANN is promulgating
>will deter the continued free expansion of e-commerce, not to
>mention their detrimental effect on the non-commercial users of the
>Internet. Such anti-competitive activities as ICANN is undertaking
>are in violation of the Sherman Act and the Federal Trade Commission
>Act, and cannot be permitted to succeed.
>
>Recently, Ralph Nader's organization has entered this process by
>sending a series of questions to Esther Dyson and the ICANN board,
>questions not unlike those contained in Tom Bliley's letter to them.
>Does Mr. Connelly pretend that Ralph Nader is in the pay of Network
>Solutions, or that he and his organization are in connivance with
>the CIA? My own organization, the ICIIU, was created to give the
>Internet users a voice in this governance process, and has as little
>to do with the CIA as it has with Network Solutions, but that does
>not stop us from criticizing ICANN. Mr. Connelly has been
>disingenuous in his letter to you, and is using the same old
>prejudicing and defamatory tactics that his organization CORE always
>uses to denigrate its opponents. Please don't be taken in by them,
>Mr. Reid.
>
>Yours,
>Michael Sondow
>============================================================
>International Congress of Independent Internet Users (ICIIU)
> http://www.iciiu.org [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>============================================================
--
William X. Walsh
General Manager, DSo Internet Services
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax:(209) 671-7934
"The fact is that domain names are new and have unique
characteristics, and their status under the law is not yet clear."
--Kent Crispin (June 29th, 1999)
