Who are you? What do you want? -- was RE: pgMedia/Name.Space

[Matthew James Gering]

The role of government is not to protect you from incompetent business.

Certainly giving the government a monopoly on the incompetence won't fix
it. An incompetent business won't survive in a competitive market -- a
monopoly business/government has a natural tendency towards incompetence
without consequence.

Please stop confusing force with trade. Your registry does not toast you
with a flame thrower. Intel does not have an armed division that coerces
people into contracts. ETC.

Matt

-----Original Message-----
> Now you see the chaos inherent
in the system. We've got to manage it to protect the poor widders and
orphans from being oppressed cuz the free market jest cain't do the job.

[Matthew James Gering]

Even if the gTLD space is so-called "public" it need not be *owned* by
government. Does the Internet fall under the bounds of a single
government? No. It must be arranged under a cooperative global entity.
If you say that it is a government function than this would be the
United Nations or some derivative.

But it need not be a government function, or at least not in the sense
that it falls on our geopolitical ones.

It can quite simply be a cooperative arrangement on the Internet. Much
like now where the gross majority of the 'net points to a handful of
well-known root servers. One might even consider moving DNS from a
hierarchical model to a distributed push/pull model like the USENET.

Trademark is a red herring. It is entirely insignificant, both with
respect to the % of disputed domains and with respect to technical
operations. Do you really expect the worlds governments to solve the
problem of international intellectual property rights overnight? Then
why bestow the DNS system on them? The monitoring and enforcement of
intellectual property falls solely in the hands of the holder, *NOT*
government. Trademarks holders are trying to get something for free, the
cost of which is too great to consider.

Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: Rahul Dhesi [mailto:dh...@rahul.net]

This can occur only if the "ownership" of the top-level domain resides
with some government.

[Matthew James Gering]

The argument is whether TLD space should be public or private. I don't
believe anyone has ever argued that root should be private or that SLDs
should be public.

Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: Bradley Dunn [mailto:pbradl...@yahoo.com]

Ok, so you are arguing that the entire namespace is a "public good"? If
the entire namespace is not public, at some point in the namespace you
are going to have signle private entities controlling common words.

Whee, imagine having to get government approval before adding A records.

[Matthew James Gering]

Governments do NOT define private property. Governments monopolize the
force by which private property is stolen, and force you to pay them
protection money such that they or others do not seize your property.
Governments are institutionalized protection rackets.

You create your property and/or trade your labor and property for it,
and it is your responsibility to protect it. If you default on your
obligation to claim and protect your property, you deserve to be looted.

Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: Rahul Dhesi [mailto:dh...@rahul.net]

Private property in any jurisdiction is defined the way the existing
government defines it. So giving a private party ownership of a
top-level domain does not protect you from the situation where the
government collapses.

[Matthew James Gering]

Administration, not ownership. Big difference. Should the government
claim public resources and administer them? That is debatable put don't
confuse the issue of public vs private.

And I said *the* root, not *a* root. There is only one root. Even the
owners of these alternate roots are attempting to get their TLDs into
*the* root, not advocated parallel roots.

Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Rutkowski [mailto:a...@chaos.com]

A major purpose of the Dept of Commerce NPRM is to lawfully transfer all
identifier responsibilities from U.S. government administration to a
private-sector body. That includes the root.

Several private root spaces have long existed.

--tony