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

[Jean-Jacques Subrenat]

Dear Milton,

your question, and the answer which you yourself provided, are interesting for what they don’t say. 

You say that ordinary Internet users do not have agency to call for the public good. And seen from inside the domain name industry and from within ICANN, that seems to make sense.

I was making a different and wider point: viewed from outside the DNS ecosystem, basic principles do not require legal defence,  and their proponents need not certify that they have agency. Today clean water is becoming scarce, and yet it falls within reason that every human being should have access to that resource, even without winning a court case. Tomorrow’s challenges will be clean air privacy, freedom of thought. 

With this in mind, and using the analogy that a language is the joint property of all its practitioners, it is disturbing to see that so many basic elements of human development, such as language, are systematically being monetised. I do not accept that anything which is not proven illegal is acceptable.

You say «the reason the DNS evolved so rapidly into an accessible and innovative resource was precisely because certain spaces were open to unregulated appropriation». That is indisputable. But one can question the value of deregulation, which is almost always accompanied by self-regulation. The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 was brought about not by small holders doing silly things, but by the strategies and behaviour of some of the largest financial companies in the world, precisely as a result of their being granted self-regulation.

Against this background, my reminder that .eu was set up « to contribute effectively to the Digital Single Market by encouraging and investing in secure and reliable e-commerce AND BUILD A STRONG DIGITAL IDENTITY FOR PEOPLE AND ORGANISATIONS IN THE EU » (my emphasis) remains valid.

Best regards,
Jean-Jacques.

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Le 19 juin 2017 à 16:56:13, Mueller, Milton L (milton at gatech.edu) a écrit:

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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