And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: How does a domain become a domain? The top tier of domain names include identifying nomenclature such as .gov, .com, .edu, .net, .org etc. It is time that First Nations achieve the same status and not be subsumed under existing designations. We are not .US, but sovereign nations. The following conference in Berlin outlines current efforts to achieve just this. The recent controversy concerning the fraudulent use of the Makah nation's name for an anti-Makah website could not occur under these changes. Ish Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 09:18:02 -0400 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Eric Brunner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: RE: Statement of TLD Delegation Practices Comments on the MAY 1999 ICANN/IANA Internet Domain Name System Structure and Delegation document. References: http://www.icann.org/tld-deleg-prac.html http://www.din.de/gremien/nas/nabd/iso3166ma/get_name.html http://www.un.org/Overview/Charter/chapte11.html The document is a summary of current practices of the IANA in administering RFC 1591, and includes the guidance contained in ccTLD News Memo #1 of 1997. The relevance to Tribal Governments and Tribal ISPs is that this text and the text it incorporates by reference, "How to get a country name into ISO 3166-1" by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency (DIN), have been employed to prevent, since 1992, the creation of a TLD for any Indigenous Group. We will discuss the sole apparent exception, the .GR (Greenland Home Rule) TLD to this general rule. The 3166/MA applies the following tests for candidate extentions to the table: I. The area name for which the inclusion in ISO 3166-1 is requested represents an area which is physically separated from its parent country. Dependent areas directly bordering on the parent country cannot be included in ISO 3166-1. and III. A request for the inclusion of a country name (or the name of a dependent area) in ISO 3166-1 must originate from the national government of the country or from the national standards body of that country. The ISO 3166/MA rejects any request which is not accompanied by a written statement from the national goverment explicitly agreeing to and supporting the request. The first test ensures that the "Blue Water Thesis", a limit on the scope of decolonization procedures required by the UN Charter which was advocated by the United States and Canada and in 1966 became General Assembly Resolution 1541, is construed in the usual sense: to be eligible for inscription as non-self-governing territories, colonies must be separated from colonizing powers by at least 30 miles of open ocean. This test, were it to have been a part of the International Law System 25 years prior, would negate the claim that Germany colonized contiguous Poland during the Second World War, or that the Poles possessed a legal right to decolonization. The text which would apply under the International System were the "Blue Water" test in GAR 1541 satisfied are Articles 73 and 74, entitled "Declaration regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories", of Chapter XI of the Charter of the United Nations, attached as an appendix to this comment. Greenland, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, etcetera, all clearly fall outside the limiting scope of GAR 1541. The Vatican State and other Statelets do not, but these were not the targets of National Liberation Movements in the 1960's. In the present, since 1992, The Six Nations, the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Wabenaki Confederacy, all Jay Treaty Nations under the joint colonial trusts of the United States and Canada, and the Navajo Nation and others under the sole colonial trust of the United States, have all attempted to obtain access to the Domain Name System as Soverign States. None has suceeded. Each has had to pick among several alternatives -- pretend to be a municipal govenment in a fictive State (the .NSN.US model), pretend to be a non-profit, or a for-profit business or ISP that just happens to be run by Indians, frequently under an alias as cybersquatting on Indian Tribal Identity is a cottage industry encouraged by the Registrar of the Generic TLDs, move "off-shore", or defer on accessing the net as a Government. At no point in this near-decade long attempt to introduce rational access to the DNS have the Governments of Canada or the United States taken cognizance of these attempts, and neither has ever explicitly agreed to supporting such a request. We do not anticipate that either State will ever do so, nor ever support the expiration of GAR 1541 and expose themselves to criticism as Colonial States. An irony of the "end of the Cold War" is that Indians are the last victims of the rhetorical finger pointing and moral grandstanding of the Nuclear Weapons States. To prevent the Soviets from scoring anti-capitalist, decolonial points in a war now entering its second decade of defunctness, the status of Tribes in the Americas had to be taken off the table for legitimate and polite discourse. Within the DNS, this situation has no mechanism for change if the IANA continues to stay "out of the business of deciding who is or isn't a State", and instead lets another agency impose the outdated construction of GAR 1541 on applicants. The ICANN/IANA needs to find another solution to the problems of TLD allocation, and in the very near future. The problem is not unique to the North Americas, it is present throughout the Americas, Oceania, Africa, Asia, and even in Europe. The DNS need not render "Stateless" every person who's primary social identity is not presently recognized as a "State" within the International System. There is no necessity, and no compelling utility argument to be made for the suppression of access to the namespace of the Internet by legitimate governments. The issue has been widely discussed in several indigenous or indigenous-centric mailing lists over the past several years, was the subject of a resolution by the National Congress of American Indians two years ago, and will be the subject of a Resolution and an Action Plan for the joint NCAI/AFN Summit this summer. It is time to resolve this problem. Questions from the ICANN/IANA board on the subject may be addressed to any of the persons cc'd in this comment, or to myself. The NetRez, TribalLaw, TribalLaw-IP, Native-Telecom, Indigneous Peoples Coalition on Biopiracy, and the Native-Web core lists are blind cc'd, and their subscribers may comment directly to ICANN on this subject by sending mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] I encourage them to do so, and to make the opportunity to comment on the application of the "Blue Water Thesis" to the Domain Name System available to others. Alan Mandell, John Cristescu, and I are in the process of constructing a registry and hereby submit a request for the creation of a "North American Aboriginal" TLD with the TLA "NAA", as an action item for the Names Council, or IANA. Eric Brunner Organizer of the (Indigenous) Intellectual Property Constituency Appendix I Article 73, contains instructions to States which exercise Trust authority under the UN Charter, specifically: a. to ensure, with due respect for the culture of the peoples concerned, their political, economic, social, and educational advancement, their just treatment, and their protection against abuses; b. to develop self-government, to take due account of the political aspirations of the peoples, and to assist them in the progressive development of their free political institutions, according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and their varying stages of advancement; d. to promote constructive measures of development, to encourage research,and to co-operate with one another and, when and where appropriate, with specialized international bodies with a view to the practical achievement of the social, economic, and scientific purposes set forth in this Article; Article 74 further instructs States which exercise Trust authority on the specific issue of policies outside the metropolitian areas: Members of the United Nations also agree that their policy in respect of the territories to which this Chapter applies, no less than in respect of their metropolitan areas, must be based on the general principle of good-neighbourliness, due account being taken of the interests and well-being of the rest of the world, in social, economic, and commercial matters. Reprinted under the fair use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html doctrine of international copyright law. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&