RE: Statements against new.net?

[Miles Fidelman <mfidelman () civicnet org>]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Patrick Greenwell wrote:

> On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, Mathew Butler wrote:
>
> > Adrian: The key word is "cooperating".  New.net (and its brethren that are
> > being born in technology incubators as we speak) are not "cooperating",
> > they're intentionally "culture-jamming" for their own gain.
>
> Perhaps you might like to define "cooperating" for us? Has ICANN
> cooperated with the individuals and organizations that currently run
> alternate TLDs which predate the existence of ICANN? Or is it
> rather simply that "might makes right" and they only need to cooperate
> with "people that matter?"

At some point cooperation has to yield to due process - at least that's
the history of society to date. Unless there's a major change to the
Internet infrastructure, we need DNS to function reliably, and that
requires that the root nameservers behave the way they're supposed to.  

Just as key pieces of the telephone system are REQUIRED to behave in
certain ways - as negotiated through well defined and legally sanctioned
processes, and enforced by the ITU and various national level authorities
- so must key pieces of the Internet be under the jurisdiction of clearly
defined processes and authorities. The Internet is no longer an experiment
that people can mess around with with impunity. Right now, like it or not,
ICANN is the duly authorized authority for Internet naming and numbering.

Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

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Information Infrastructure: Public Spaces for the 21st Century 
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