[governance] Help create the .nyc Internet space for New York

[Karl Auerbach]

Sylvia Caras wrote:

> Here, I'm wanting to ... look at naming
> from the point of view of ordinary people, children first coming on
> line

Is it useful to think that we are wise enough to impose, from above, a 
taxonomy of names and meanings onto the internet?

Suppose the internet had started 30 years earlier and we had, in the 
usage of the day, created a TLD called .gay to hold things that were 
light and happy.

We'd find today that such a TLD would be mispurposed, the meaning of the 
word used in the name had substantially changed.

My point of view is that internet governance, at lest with regard to 
domain names, ought to be limited to allocating "slots" - rights to put 
a name into a zone file.  The governance system should be entirely blind 
to the character string composing the name itself.

What that name is ought to entirely be up to the whim of the 
person/entity to whom that slot is granted (as long as the name is not 
previously used and meets internet naming standards, such as being 1 to 
63 bytes in length, properly conforming to IDN encoding prefixes, etc) 
(Disputes about names can be waged in the already existing fora for 
resolving such disputes; we hardly need to establish another one.)

Humans appear to like their language to be pliable - they tend to take 
Humpty's side in his chat with Alice from Chapter VI of "Through the 
Looking Glass" 
(http://www.literature.org/authors/carroll-lewis/through-the-looking-glass/chapter-06.html 
):

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it 
means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many 
different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's 
all.'

		--karl--











____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance