William,
> > What do such domains do to reduce confusion; that is,
> > to enhance domain namespace (or the net in general) for
> > communication? Zilch.
>
> I Fail to see why they should HAVE to ensure that registrants in
> per were really individuals. The registry is in the business of
> registering names, if someone or a company sees a value in having a
> name under that TLD, it is really thier concern, not the concern of
> the registry.
>
The general concept I have been enunciating is that 'value' was
not invented by or for commerce. It has deep roots in the whole
spectrum of human relations which we call 'society,' and the whole
structure needs to be actively sustained by all its components, or it
*disintegrates. (I hope you understand this is not just rhetoric, but
a belief derived from experience in 'emerging' countries, where the
effects of the purely economic imperative ('globalization') can be
fairly seen.)
>From its earliest days, being online has been described in terms of
'community,' although just what that meant has rarely been spelled
out. (For one thing, the effort to spell it out usually is itself
disintegrative, like analysing why you love someone.) Now, with
the ICANN 'experiment,' the failure to look at the whole picture and
to follow through the implications of the philosophy that if one just
follows one's 'self-interest' or one's economic interest, the whole
will take care of itself -- i.e. 'atomism' -- is coming home to roost.
Its understandable that these fractionated 'interests' are unable to
agree on how to manage the *technical details of the net -- but they
cant even agree on how to establish a convincing structure in which
their *disagreements can be addressed! This one fact convinces
me that *technique (shall we say technocracy?) -- whether it
involves reliance on hardware, or on the corpus of case law -- is not
able to prove its own case. ICANN cannot succeed as a purely
technical body; it is *necessarily a social construct -- but no one
involved seems to appreciate that building social structures from
scratch is not as easy as it sounds.
Otoh, we can impute profound powers of insight to Postel and
Magaziner; surely they must have foreseen that this kind of
foofaraw would have to go one until everyone was exhausted, at
which time a de-facto autocratic solution would be accepted in
order to 'move on'...
I for one dont give them such credit, for so doing would truly insult
the rest of us. I would much rather work from the assumption that
anyone can work towards a solution *according to their abilities
to identify the problem*. Therefore, I try to bring the dimensions of
the problem into focus, in order to push the technical perspective to
its limits, and demonstrate that in every direction, it falls short.
Naturally, having ones worldview *tested makes people
uncomfortable: that's the nature of the learning process, whether
for kids in school or communities in development or all of us in the
digital revolution. Or rather, that's the nature of the *opportunity to
learn; the learning comes in facing the test, taking the opportunity,
meeting the challenge, 'dealing with it', breaking through to the
other side; coming out with a new worldview, in which (for instance)
adding 2 + 2 is no longer a 'magical' operation, but a 'sensible'
one.
> But then, my views on chartered TLDs are well known. I think most
> implementations of them I have seen are flawed, or unneccesary.
> If anything they do nothing but strengthed the flawed view Trademark
> Interests already have over the whole domain name issue, by placing
> a set of rules over the use of a string of characters. Strings of
> characters will have numerous different meanings based on their
> context, and I have not seen a single person justify why we should
> advocate the limiting of options people and companies should have
> with regards to the use of these strings.
Hows this: because individual people and companies are not all
there are? There is also the collective, community, society, public
domain, whatever you choose to call it. The history of civilization
may be a raggedy precedent, but its all we have, and it is anything
but the record of *limits* that people place on themselves? But
there is no record that shows that anyone ever limited themselves
*in order that someone else should be unlimited*. (Why is that?
Because the result is *two societies -- which option is not open to
the Internet.) That is to say, no 'self-interested' group ever created
a 'public domain' from scratch; if there is to be such a thing, it has
to be there from the beginning, and all subsequent acts (by
individuals and 'subcultures') have to preserve and sustain it --
voluntarily, of course -- or show cause why they should not.
In short, we could be looking at the realization of real self-
governance ('libertarianism') -- but the libertarians don't seem to be
interested (it's easier to argue about who should conduct the test!)
But do you see any alternative to getting an autocratic structure by
default -- one that we can get to from here? And is ISOC any more
likely to take up 'social issues' than IFWP?
> I think that charter TLDs may be appriopriate in certain
> instances, but that each instance should be CAREFULLY examined, and
> they should occur only after it has been determined that there is
> truly a need to be met with regard to the area of the charter that
> unchartered namespace cannot meet, and that the string in question
> is not likely to have a practical use outside the scope of the
> charter.
>
Im hardly comfortable with chartered domains either, but they
may be a practical solution to the problems of naming *if they are
established as social (sub-)structures, not simply economic ones.
This of course comes back to the original meaning of 'charter' (on
which Rachel's Enviro & Health Weekly has lots of stuff online)...
Cheers,
kerry
