Hello Bret and Roeland and all --
I am afraid that the implications of policy positions of various
factions has a great deal to do with the entire issue of allocation of
membership constituency votes to board seats, as the policy issues
guide submerged motives for favoring one or another proposal that
affects balances of constituency voting power.
The AIP concepts of Research Committees that are obligated to fair
evaluation of the related issues is one way to reduce this tension and
leave the decisions to fair minded research committees. But it is
limited to specific investigations of proposed rule making.
My Fair Hearing Panels are a related but nore generally aplicable
idea, if they can be called forth in general and not limited to only
cases where a Research Committee proposes something that someone does
not like, and wishes to stop.
My notion is that a Fair Hearing Panel should result from a petition
to the NC which would include a statement of why a Panel is needed to
"hear" the case. Also, I call for some standing Fair Hearing Panels,
such os one to deal with regional and geo-political minority problems
that might arise. The need is for some way to guarantee that the DNSO
(or even the ICANN Board if ICANN embraces the idea) is guaranteed to
hear aobut the issue and be obligated to fairly look into it.
So, I do believe that a great deal of our difficulty in coming ot
agreent on structure has to do with the worst nightmares of many
parties who find themselves faced with having to buy into a pig in a
poke in terms of what policies they are blindly accepting with any
given allocation of votes to constituencies.
So, for instance, biving 33% of the votes to a TM constituency,
coupled with a 50% quorum and majority voting, maens that the TM
constituency can have control of any meeting where with a quorum of
only 65%. In my view, and the view of many others, this is out of
balance and offers too much power to the TM constituency. This is
much more than just a voice in the affairs of the DNSO.
Now, as for the structural aspects of the TM/DNS conflict, the main
problem as I see it is that there are not enough TLDs to afford all TM
owners of the same name to also have unique DNS names with differnet
TLD "qualifiers" which serve the same role in DNS that commercial
categories serve in "commerce" to allow the ame name to by used
without confusion.
A major problem seems to be that many people do not see the TLD name
as serving this role of differentiation among uses of the same TM
name.
But, the fact is the NMA.COM and NMA.ORG are very different names,
though this fact of differentiation has not yet soaked into the minds
of Internet Users and the TM industry.
So, instead of our being able to make an agreement about the need to
add more TLDs, wea re fighting over the quesiton of whao is going to
get the power to add to or restrict the addition of new TLD names.
Mix all this with the great issue of whether all TLDS must be run
Not-For-Profit or not, without resolving this question in advance, and
we have the poisonous stew with which we are trying to deal.
And add it the contentious question of whether or not any TLDs can be
owned by anyone or are common resources that collectively belong to
all the people on the earth, and must now be managed in their
collective interest, so we now have to have a fair way to alocate
board votes to all the peple on the earth, whether they have any
knowledge of DNS or not, and you have created an impossible 3D matrix
of unresolvable issues when it comes to allocating votes to
constituencies.
So, it seems to me that we cannot just ignore all these issues and
create a voting structure that has not sense of them. Too many people
are having worst nightmares just thinking about the possible outcomes
from various vote allocation schemes.
Cheers...\Stef
>From your message Tue, 9 Feb 1999 13:21:09 -0500:
}
}Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:
}
}>I'm just tossing this to start things off. It addresses the fundamental
}>issue wrt trademarks. It is an insight that I think we can all agree with
}>at some level. Much of the disagreements between the two drafts are on
}>trademark issues. I feel that it is long past time to resolve them, or
}>admit that it is an intractable problem.
}
}I disagree. We're just talking about the structure of the DNSO at this
}point. I really see nothing about the debate on the two drafts as bearing
}on trademark issues. Perhaps we can defer this until after the DNSO is
}created and operational. -- Bret
