[ncdnhc-discuss] Membership Status ofSiliconValleyPublicAccess Link

[Kent Crispin]

On Mon, Nov 05, 2001 at 05:29:02PM +0900, Chun Eung Hwi wrote:
> Dear Kent,
> 
> > > The contact point has the voting right and plays the role of
> > > communication with that organization. Therefore, so far as our charter
> > > clearly excludes those organizations which use the Internet primarily for
> > > commercial activity, it is absolutely inappropriate for any person, who
> > > engaged in those activity and moreover in those activities that ICANN has
> > > some direct relations in its interests, to take the contact point of
> > > non-commerical constituency.
> > 
> > Nonsense.  You are manufacturing conflict.
> > 
> > 1) There are non-commercial registries; there is absolutely
> > no compelling reason to exclude them from voting participation in the
> > NCC.  
> 
> Sure! Non-commercial registries like most ccTLDs. Now, they have
> non-voting status in our constituency. We have never excluded them from
> the NCC.

I said "voting participation".  Explain to me why a university that 
runs a registry should be excluded from voting in the NCC.

> > 2) Despite the fact that the question has been raised many times, no one
> > has ever articulated a clear description of why the interests of
> > commercial and non-commercial entities would differ greatly as far as
> > the domain name system is concerned.  I have concluded that the reason 
> > for this failure is because there is no compelling difference between 
> > the interests of commercial entities and non-commercial entities as far 
> > as the domain name system is concerned.
> 
> If it is to be described, we could say that the interests of
> non-commercial entities would seek public interests but not private
> interests

That's mostly a tautology, not an explanation.

> or users' interests but not providers' interests. I believe that
> you could find out very clear differences between two regarding the domain
> name system if you could read again the whole resolutions that had been
> adopted in this constituency.

You have missed the point entirely.  The *problem* is that the NCC has a
restrictive definition of who can be members, and even more, the
selection effects are creating a constituency with a very narrow,
unrepresentative, ideological base.  You cite the resolutions of that
narrow ideological base as examples of the views of non-commercial
entities in general.

In other words, the NCC not representative of non-commercial entities 
in general, which it is suppose to be, and the resolutions you cite are 
actually examples of that narrowness of the point of view of the NCC. 
They are not examples of the concerns of non-commercial entities in 
general.

The problem is quite fundamental -- the early membership of the NCC
includes people who have aggressively proselytized their point of view,
and have largely captured the NCC -- a concrete example of capture in
operation.  

I know that you will claim that this is just "outreach", but the
outreach is rather selective in fact.  The original vision of the NCC
(which I know, because I was there when it was proposed) was for
libraries, schools, and so on.  But the current membership includes very
few such entities.  and instead includes a disproportionate number of
organizations whose central mission is political activism. 

These organizations are now jealously trying to exclude anyone who 
doesn't follow their point of view.  Hence the completely bogus stuff 
about "conflict of interest".  

There is no conflict of interest issue.  An entity that qualifies for
membership should be able to chosw WHOEVER IT THINKS WILL BEST REPRESENT
ITS INTERESTS.  The constituency should not be pre-defining what it
thinks those interests are. 

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent at songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain