Re: Draft New Draft

[John Charles Broomfield <jbroom@manta.outremer.com>]

Hi Antony,
	I think you express too much fear about "sovereignty". The problem
might be with the conception or definition of what sovereign actually means.
I consider a country to be sovereign over its land for example (lets not get
into discussion of countries that have conflicts over their boundaries). I
don't expect a country outside of the U.S.A. telling the USA how its
property should be managed, and somehow being guaranteed the right to even
be listened to. If someone from outside the USA has a property dispute about
a piece of land in the USA, I would expect it to be settled under USA law.
I think that most countries in some form or another declare that their land
belongs to them, and that they can do what they want with it. If it were not
so, and you could argue that your piece of land is YOURS and has nothing to
do with the government, then arguably you could go on to unilaterally
declare your own country... So, it would follow that governments are
sovereign over their land.
Does this mean that the government decides who owns what piece of land and
that the government controls organisations that own land? Certainly not. It
just means that there is a recognition of a certain chain of command or that
local laws will be upheld. Do some governments act unfairly wrt to land
ownership? You bet. Does this mean that outside entities can do anything
about it? Probably not much, apart from maybe pressuring their own
governments to condemn those actions. If an entity outside of a country
tries to tell it how to allocate land, the probable response would be along
the lines of "go boil your head" (with varying degrees of politeness).
Do you feel that the US is sovereign over its land? (I believe that the
"freemen" don't and try to declare "freelands" or something along those
lines). If you do believe that the US is sovereign over its land, you'll
probably agree with me that the USG does not intervene in every exchange of
titles does it?
You say that we need rules not rulers. Sounds very nice, but there HAVE to
be rulers, otherwise those rules don't get enforced (who is there to judge
if they have been broken? who is there to decide those rules? who is there
to decide the punishment and enforce that it is done? etc...)
I think that most people will accept that it is logical that the law for any
given ccTLd should be the law of that territory. Or put another way, it is
for that territory to decide how it's ccTLD should be governed. For me, that
is what sovereignty means.
It does of course follow that if local law has to be followed, it is the
local government that decides, if of course there is a decision to be made.
After all, *someone* has to be the judge...

Yours, John Broomfield.

(...)
> What I'm saying is that there is more than one party that needs to be
> brought to the table when decisions are made.  I think that is what the DNSO
> process is about.  In Japan, in Taiwan, in Norway, in the Netherlands, in
> Canada, in many domains, something is evolving whereby a council or assembly
> or some other gathering of interests occurs so that all the affected parties
> can make decisions jointly.
> To my mind, "sovereignty" means something else altogether.  It means that
> there is only one party making a decision, arbitrarily if they would.  That
> is not right, and what is more, it is not the terms under which ccTLDs were
> brought into being.  It is new, and the domains have *not* been consulted
> about it.  My Norwegian is not so poor that I cannot translate the
> following:
> 
>                  UNINETT har fått delegert ansvaret for .no-domenet fra IANA
>                  (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority).
> 
> And that is the basis and authority under and by which ccTLDs have been
> delegated worldwide.  It may be that this should change.  But it should not
> change without due process and without the involvement of all the affected
> parties.  A government has rights, but it doesn't have divine rights.  We
> need an evolution, not a revolution.  We need rules, not rulers.  We need a
> process, not a putsch.
> Antony