Public consultation on the evaluation and revision of the .eu top-level domain regulations

[Mueller, Milton L]

Jean-Jacques
I merely asked why ordinary people, including businesses as well as individuals, cannot register any EU names they want. I don’t see a clear answer to that question in your reply.

I am always a bit amused and a bit confused by statements like these:

names to companies for their benefit, people are appalled to see that the names of commonplace objects, resources, living organisms and common concepts are increasingly being sanctuarized by and for business. What place does that leave for the common good, the common weal, those things and notions which we can consider as humanity’s joint inheritance?

So, who registers a name on behalf of “humanity”? Is there a Mr. Jean-Jacques Humanity somewhere who can register and use this domain? Shall Ms. Common Weal register and use the names of resources, living organisms and common concepts?

The problem with these calls for a disembodied public good is that they lack agency. There is no public that acts, there are only individual citizens who act. There is no humanity, there are only humans. Someone has to act on behalf of these collective entities, and it’s naïve to think that it is easy or simple to develop institutional arrangements to do so without giving some people a lot of power, which can be used for good or ill.

The reason the DNS evolved so rapidly into an accessible and innovative resource was precisely because certain spaces were open to unregulated appropriation. Yes, this create some problems, and policies have evolved and are evolving to deal with them. But We don’t solve the problem of optimal use of these registrations of unique character strings by appealing to nonexistent collective entities.

Dr. Milton L. Mueller
Professor, School of Public Policy
Georgia Institute of Technology



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