Years ago, I used to spend a lot of time in ICANN-land. Happily, my contacts these days are pretty much limited to the occassional post-cards from friends.
But a recent contretemps caught my eye. Apparently new registry contracts will now allow price-tiering for names. As Milton Mueller at ICANNWatch observes, this raises similar worries as tiered internet access.
This is why Sascha Meinrath’s & Victor Pickard’s new paper on redefining net neutrality is important. Meinrath and Pickard make the very good point that the openess of the Internet rests on more than just residential access providers. Those concerned with the current fight to maintain net neutrality — as narrowly defined as preventing the last-mile access provider from defining the internet experience — should be aware of the need to protect other potential bottlenecks from emerging.
And, for us old timers, there is a certainly irony. Back in ye ancient days, when the “destroy the evil tld monopolist Network Solutions” [now Verisign the registry, not NetSol the registrar] crowd were backing ICANN, one of their great boogeyman arguments for ICANN regulation of registries was it would prevent tiered pricing of names. Some of us tried to explain how things like “agency capture” work, and that therefore such policies could change unless we inserted suitable checks and balances in ICANN to maintain accountability, but we were just lawyers and other useless policy types and they were the engineers who built the domain name system, so what did we know? (Bitter? Me? Why do you think I no longer spend time in ICANN-land?)
What I love most about reality, is how it will always turn around and bite you in the rear end if you decide to ignore it. Reality soooo does not care that you chose to be ignorant of things like economics and political science, any more than it cares when idiots in poli-sci decide they can dictate technology and try to make idiotic rules about blocking net gambling or blocking indecency or outlawing peer-2-peer. Reality doesn’t care. It just is.
Gotta love something that democratic.
Stay tuned . . . .