Re: Draft New Draft

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Mon, Feb 08, 1999 at 08:15:59PM -0500, Antony Van Couvering wrote:
[...]> 
> Presumably you can square the following circle then:
> 
>       'Significantly interested parties in the domain should agree that
>       the designated manager is the appropriate party.'
> 
> Now unless there is an ISO country-code domain with more than one government
> in it -- Antarctica, maybe -- it seems to me that there is always more than
> one interested party, and one of them is not the government.

The government is the most significant of those interested parties.

[...]

> > I have come to think of this as very similar to the trademark issue,
> > in fact.  A country has some distinct form of intellectual property
> > right in its ISO code.  It is a complex property right, to be sure,
> > different from trademark or copyright, but a right, nonetheless.
> 
> Sure, RFC 1591 agrees with you here (NOT):
> 
>       Concerns about "rights" and "ownership" of domains are
>       inappropriate.  It is appropriate to be concerned about
>       "responsibilities" and "service" to the community.

Sure.  The government in question defines what those terms mean.  It 
also defines the community.

[...]

> > In any case, my opinion, and I suspect the opinion of ICANN, is that
> > the founding documents of the DNSO should contain no policy
> > statements at all.  They should just describe the organizational
> > structure and mechanisms.
> 
> I don't believe that it is a policy statement to remark that the ICANN, and
> its subsidiary organizations such as the DNSO, is pursuing an evolution of
> the DNS (that is to say, a move forward with an eye to history) rather than
> a revolution (starting from scratch), and as such should recognize the rules
> under which domains have operated to date.

Of course it is a policy statement.

> Furthermore, I don't think it's any stretch at all to say that proposing a
> constituency for one group (e.g. trademark interests) and not for another
> (e.g., public interest groups) is a political statement as strong as any
> respecting relevant RFCs.

The set of constituencies named are explicitly an initial set of 
constituencies, and other constituencies can be added.  There is a 
more general constituency (the "non-commercial" constituency) that 
is a natural home for public interest organizations.  However, it 
might be a perfectly reasonable thing to create a public interest 
constituency in its own right -- I have no problem with that.

-- 
Kent Crispin, PAB Chair				"Do good, and you'll be
kent@songbird.com				lonesome." -- Mark Twain