[governance] NTIA announcement on JPA

[Karl Auerbach]

William Drake wrote:

> Given the politics and legalities, what's a plausible scenario?

The first question that one should ask before starting down a road 
toward governance is this: Is there a problem that needs to be solved?

I would submit that for much of what is happening on the internet there 
is no problem that needs solving.

In other words the null hypothesis - doing nothing - should always be 
among the options considered when we look at governing the internet.

Let's look at the case that people always use as their poster child for 
regulation: the domain name system.

It is assumed or asserted that there must be something called a global 
authoritative DNS name space.[*]

Why?

I suggest that rather than a top down system, which is what ICANN is, 
that acts as an overlord of names, we would obtain a quite workable 
worldwide DNS if we simply let DNS systems arise, fight with one another 
for users/customers, and allow feeble ones to die.

What would be the fastest road for a DNS provider to become feeble and 
die - it would be to offer resolution services that surprise users with 
inconsistencies and gaps.

In other words, the desire to remain in business would coerce DNS 
providers to become consistent with one another without any need of a 
worldwide overlording regulatory body.

Moreover, the absence of an ICANN-like overlord would allow new TLD 
offerings to come into being, fight for visibility, and naturally grow 
or die in pretty much the same way that new TV channels fight for space 
on cable and satellite systems in the US or the same way that new brands 
of toothpaste seek shelf space in stores and markets.  It's a well known 
process that goes under names like "building a brand" and "carving out 
market share".

And how would disputes over names be resolved - the way they always have 
been in the trade space - in court using rules of law (including those 
regarding the importation of external judgments by a local/domestic court.)

I suggest that one option for many of areas of internet governance is to 
not govern at all.

For those things that do remain to be governed, the next question to ask 
is whether those matters can be stripped of discretion and reduced to 
clerical jobs.  Most of the IANA job would fall into that category.

These clerical kinds tend to be non-contentious.  Does anybody get upset 
about the ITU doing the job of assigning the magic numbers that glue the 
mobile telephone systems together?   These sorts of things can often 
simply be contracted-out for their performance or handed to a handy 
already-existing body.

There are a very few remaining things that need real oversight with the 
exercise of discretion and the balancing of competing interests.  Those 
are the hard things.  But those hard things are made much easier to 
handle if they have been pre-stripped of all of the bells and whistles 
that do not require governance or that are clerical.

[*] By-the-way, many of the properties claimed of DNS with regard to it 
being a system of global unique identifiers do not hold up under 
scrutiny.  The main way that DNS names fail is that they do not have 
strong temporal invariance - DNS names often change meaning over time. 
See my note on this at 
http://www.cavebear.com/archive/rw/nrc_presentation_july_11_2001.ppt

		--karl--



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