[governance] Response to personal attacks Re: PIR Case/or the .org sell

[Norbert Bollow]

Dear all

This is a response to the posting which I'm quoting in full below.

I felt personally attacked and hurt by that posting.

If conduct such as what is exemplified in that posting continues to
occur on this list, and if it continues to be tolerated in this online
community [which is supposed to be a "civil society" community, which
certainly implies in particular that it should not be an environment
where "business" people ( https://www.pch.net/about/people lists the
author of that posting as "executive director" in the section titled
"business") would be allowed to dominate the discourse and its informal
rules by telling us what is and what isn't an acceptable way of writing
about what we think and fear etc; and also the Charter of this
community explicitly forbids personal attacks (like e.g. "You’re going
overboard in your effort to create FUD." and "You don’t appear to be
trying to have a conversation in good faith.") and the Charter also
explicitly mandates the coordinators to enforce these posting rules],
that severely impacts how much anyone is going to engage in discussions
here unless they're one of the relatively few people who either enjoy
interacting in a context of a toxic and dysfunctional community or who
are able to invest a very high amount of personal energy into doing so.

In regard to substance, I now think that what Bill wrote in his
postings in this thread is largely correct. After my first posting in
this thread, before Bill replied to it, Amr Elsadr, had already
responded with good substantive answers to the questions and fears that
I had expressed in that particular posting. And I had already replied to
Amr thanking him for that.

Through Amr's posting, I have come to understand that the financial
aspects, and the economic implications of those financial aspects, are
unlikely to cause the kind of huge problems that I at first feared.

Nevertheless that doesn't cause me to feel any less betrayed by ISOC's
decision. Therefore, what actually drives my emotions of feeling very
deeply betrayed by ISOC's decision, and my accordingly continuing
objection to ISOC's decision, must be something else.

Niels ten Oever got much closer to what is for me the heart of the
matter in his blogpost
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/hri/private-equity-firm-procures-org-internet-society-or-how-public-interest-got-sold-out-again/
— except that for me, being both part of communities of people who
strongly believe in the importance of non-profit-oriented organizing,
who got betrayed, and being also a member of ISOC, which did the
betraying, the issue is quite personal and emotional for me in more
ways than one.

So yes, in the matter of this particular issue, I posted before really
understanding where the heart of the issue is. I did so by asking
questions, which for me were actually real questions (based on fears
that I had at the time), and when Amr gave valid answers to those
questions, I accepted them. I believe that it must be acceptable to ask
such questions as I asked without getting accused of acting in bad
faith, even if — I'll certainly admit that — I was a bit emotional and
polemical in asking those questions.

I would insist that it is unacceptable for any requirement to be
imposed that one would have to first get rid of one's emotions, such as
feelings of having been betrayed by one of the major holders of trust
in Internet governance, before being allowed to participate in a civil
society conversation on Internet governance.

I would also like to note the following about assumptions and sources:
Anything which is stated without explicit justification is —pretty much
by definition of the concept of an assumption— an assumption for the
purposes of any arguments that are explicitly or implicitly based on
that statement. That does not preclude the possibility that there can be
valid reasons, such as sources and/or arguments, for making particular
assumptions. I will certainly accept as a possible source for an
assumption the intuition of someone who has a lot of experience dealing
with the particular topic area (such as in this case the intuition of
someone who credibly claims "thirty five years of experience dealing
with domain names"). That doesn't imply that I would necessarily agree
to also base my thinking on the same assumptions (in fact I see nothing
wrong in basing my assumptions on an intuition shaped by observing that
very many individuals and communities of people have been royally
screwed in unexpected ways, in very many different contexts, and
typically with no reasonably available effective recourse whatsoever,
by trust and promises getting carelessly broken on the basis of
profit-oriented business thinking; therefore I think it quite
reasonable to choose my assumptions more along the lines of the
"anything that can go wrong will probably go wrong somewhere, somehow,
and possibly massively, unless effective measures are taken to prevent
the bad things from happening" variant of Murphy's law), nor does it
imply that I would necessarily refrain from thinking about whether
there might be good counterarguments to what experienced people assume
on the basis of their intuition even in contexts where they have much
relevant experience. But my accepting the intuition of people with
significant relevant experience as a possible source for assumptions
means that I will stop wondering about the source for a claim once it
has been explained that it comes from intuition based on long
experience with the particular topic area.

Greetings,
Norbert

P.S. Going forward, I'm planning to focus my personal energy on other
topics, and therefore I'm not planning to engage further in discussing
these matters, at least not in the context of this list which has a long
history of sometimes being a quite toxic and dysfunctional environment.
But I did want to respond to that particular posting and in particular
to its personal attacks against me.



On Fri, 29 Nov 2019 00:04:46 +0100
Bill Woodcock <woody at pch.net> wrote:

> > On Nov 28, 2019, at 1:24 PM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> > What's your source for the assumption that a price hike would only
> > increase the price to $12/year or $15/year?  
> 
> You can’t have it both ways, either it’s my assumption, or I have an
> external source for it.
> 
> As it happens, it’s my assumption.  I base it on thirty five years of
> experience dealing with domain names, and the further foundational
> assumptions that any purchaser of PIR would, at worst, be interested
> in maximizing profit, rather than in minimizing the number of
> registrations.
> 
> Why would you assume otherwise?
> 
> > A related question is whether there is anything in the rules that
> > would prevent price differentiation  
> 
> How is that related?  Also, the answer is “yes.”  Trying to make it
> sound as though that’s an unanswered question, or doesn’t have an
> answer which is obvious and clear, is fatuous.
> 
> > it might charge say $1000/year or $10000/year or even more?  
> 
> Did you somehow hope that that wouldn’t sound ridiculous, as you were
> typing it?
> 
> > We should also consider the perspective of the general public, who
> > will get annoyed by lots of broken links to non-profit orgs and to
> > content provided by them.  
> 
> No, they won’t, because it won’t happen.  You’re going overboard in
> your effort to create FUD.
> 
> > Do we really want to live in a world where a price hike is allowed
> > to break all links to content at archive.org and intgovforum.org
> > etc etc?  
> 
> Utter straw-man.
> 
> You don’t appear to be trying to have a conversation in good faith.
> 
>                                 -Bill
>