IP: Old Internet Thinking RIP

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

As usual, comments appreciated.

Dave


------ Forwarded Message
From: "Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law" <froomkin () law miami edu>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 15:34:00 -0400 (EDT)
To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Subject: for IP?

Old Internet Thinking RIP
http://www.icannwatch.org/article.php?sid=927

Carl Malamud, one of the sponsors of the IMS proposal for .org, has posted
his response [1] to ICANN's tentative decision to give .org to an as yet
non-existent body to be created somehow or other by its good friends at
ISOC.[2] The essay demonstrates why IMS's hopes, and the rest of us
probably, are doomed.

See, the problem is that Malamud's entire essay is consumed with
irrelevant Old Internet considerations like running code, technical merit,
and whether it makes sense to evaluate a program without ever looking at
it. This IETF-style approach to the problem of finding reasonable
solutions to problems has no place in the Brave New Internet of today
where expensive consulting firms decide that proposals produced by
expensive consulting firms have the most merit, where merit is defined as
producing familiar-looking paper. Only a dinosaur would have failed to
notice that "the ICANN .ORG review mechanism literally restates the ICANN
new open gTLD contract award order." [3] Only an ostrich would fail to see
that ICANN has learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the gTLD rollout
debacle. Recall that mere factual errors were no reason to upset the gTLD
allocations.[4]

Read Malamud's essay.[1] Don't miss the Grrrrrreat slides. [5] Weep or
gnash your teeth. There's not much else you can do now that the ICANN
Board is preparing [6] to undermine just about every form of outside
accountability that might be brought to bear on it.[7]

It is possible to argue that ISOC will do a perfectly competent job on
..org. It just won't have the lowest prices. And, if Malamud is to be
believed (I am not competent to judge, but he is), it won't have the best
technology. And it certainly won't do anything to increase competition in
the market for providers of registry services. But you can't have
everything, can you? And no doubt we'll have the comfort of knowing that
..org is in safe and familiar hands as soon as ISOC actually gets around to
telling us who will be involved in running this new corporation they are
planning to set up Real Soon Now.

I'd feel somewhat less bad about that argument if ICANN would release the
data [8] that might back it up. Unless of course the data show something
else. Assuming it exists.

Notes

[1] http://not.invisible.net/signals/bin/000270.shtml

[2] http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-19aug02.htm

[3] http://www.icannwatch.org/article.php?sid=922

[4] http://www.icannwatch.org/article.php?sid=22

[5] http://trusted.resource.org/Grrrrrrr.pdf

[6] http://www.icann.org/committees/evol-reform/links.htm

[7] http://www.icannwatch.org/article.php?sid=575

[8] http://www.icannwatch.org/article.php?sid=923

-- 
        Please visit http://www.icannwatch.org
A. Michael Froomkin   |    Professor of Law    |   froomkin () law tm
U. Miami School of Law, P.O. Box 248087, Coral Gables, FL 33124 USA
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