> I think ICANN is heading in more or less the right direction despite its
> many imperfections, and I want to help make it better. It is not governing
> the world, and god forbid *anything* should be put to a global vote. It is
> trying to organize bottom-up courtesy of the people most concerned with the
> Net's infrastructure, and draw them in through outreach. It implements its
> policies through contracts, not by "governing."
Yes, ICANN is certainly "bottom-up courtesy of the people most concerned
with the Net's infrastructure".
ICANN is indeed very much created courtesy some of the corporate entities
that make money by providing network infrastructures. But even more,
ICANN gets its support from companies that want to sell things over the
Internet.
The result is an ICANN that is created by, and obligated to, those who
think of the Internet nothing more than a vehicle for the making of money
for themselves.
>From the point of view of users of the Internet, i.e. those people from
whom that money will be extracted, this is more than a simple
"imperfection". Rather it is an inversion of the most fundamental
concerns about the Internet and how it is to be used.
If Gutenburg had the same priorities as ICANN, he would have printed a
Sharper Image catalog rather than a bible.
-------
One might also find it interesting to consider that "contracts" is not
"governing" when, in fact, those contracts are a "take it or leave it"
matter that ICANN can dictate due to its government sponsored hegemony
over the DNS system.
A true contractual regime presupposes a degree of negotion, or at least
the possibility of negotiation, between the parties involved. ICANN has a
government given monopoly position that forecloses such negotiotion.
Perhaps some don't want to use the word "government" in conjunction with
ICANN. But in my dictionary, the word is an apt and appropriate
description.
And anyone who believes that such "contracts" are "technical coordination"
of the Internet is either naive or disingenuous.
ICANN's pronouncements fall upon all who use the Internet. Whether the
mechanism is by royal fiat, legislative act, administrative rule, or
non-negotiable contract, the effect is the same. The Scholastics among us
can engage in dialogs, as meaningful as those dialogs about the number of
angels that can dance on the head of a pin, and say that there is a
distinction. But at the end of the day, when the ICANN taxman knocks on
the door and threatens to prevent one from using the Internet unless that
person pays his tithe, it doesn't really matter whether the taxman rode a
contractual horse or in a legislative carriage.
--karl--
