Approval process for gtld service changes

[Milton Mueller]

Marc
Thanks for the comments, they are good at getting 
some important discussion going. Below I respond to only 
one aspect of your comments; other messages will respond 
to other aspects.

>>> Marc Schneiders <marc at schneiders.org> 01/11/04 08:55AM >>>
>>We are also
>> not convinced of [ICANN's] ability to engage in competition policy-related
>> forms of regulation.

>I am not that convinced either. But I do not see how national
>regulatory authorities can take care of consumer protection. How can a
>Dutch registrant handle an issue with a registry located in the US?

Marc, have you ever flown a US airline? A Japanese one?
If so, how are you as a consumer protected? I myself have flown on 
Chinese, Japanes, Swiss, French and German airlines all the time. 
Where is the air-ICANN to regulate them?

>Dutch bodies will not be able to help him. So he has to find one in
>the US that helps him? If so, this brings up the topic of the US
>centredness of ICANN again. This is a problem we need to acknowledge
>in this context.

The US-centric issue is mostly a red herring in this context.
The US Dept of Commerce's residual contractual power over
ICANN has almost nothing to do with consumer protection issues.

>Plainly: We may not like ICANN getting more power. But who else is
>going to protect us against cases like PIR deleting IDN domain names
>without even so much as telling the registrants? To me this looks like
>a jungle. And if I want to do something about it, I have to hire a US
>lawyer. I think this is just bad.

Some aspects of your comments are typical of the regulatory 
naivete that characterizes the ICANN community. 

First, a very specific issue: I will bet you money that PIR deleted
those IDN names because that is what ICANN wants it to do.
Or because that is what it _thinks_ ICANN wants it to do. 
If you think ICANN is going to reverse those decisions you are 
100% wrong. ICANN wants to control the standard for IDN 
implementation, allegedly for technical stability reasons. In order 
to do that it must wipe out unauthorized implementations. 

Second, and more important, a general principle. Giving ICANN
additional powers and telling it to use it to "protect the public
interest" does not by itself protect the public interest. ICANN
must be made _accountable_ to the relevant public, and the incentives
of its staff and Board must be realigned so that ICANN is compelled
to pursue something closer to the public interest than not. 

The naive view, which I see a lot among techies, is something
like this: I have a problem with [a supplier]. I want someone
to solve that problem for me. I don't want to have to spend 
any of my own money (i.e., hire a lawyer). So I conclude that someone, 
anyone, should look over the shoulder of that supplier and have the 
power to force it to do things. That will make me better off than before. 

Obviously when I state the assumption that baldly it is 
not so convincing, is it? But that is basically what you are
saying. 

This is what I call the "God" theory of regulation. The regulator
is assumed to know everything about everything, and to have
the purest of motives, and so will only the intervene in ways that
help the public. 

If solving regulatory problems were that easy,
the world would be a wonderful place. 

You note yourself that the ICANN-registry contracts do
not protect the public that much. Why is that? Why is
it that ICANN has so far done so much to protect
trademark rights and almost nothign to protect individual
registrants? Do you think that is an accident? Do you think
that will be changed without fundamentally changing
who is represented within ICANN and how its decisions
are made? 

--MM