[CCWG-ACCT] Resolution of Mission Language related to regulation and contract

[Andrew Sullivan]

(I dropped the staff alias; this doesn't seem like instructions to
them.)

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 05:29:57PM -0500, George Sadowsky wrote:

> 1. Can ICANN Inc. make policies regarding which strings they will delegate?  What are the degrees of freedom under which they can make them?
> 

Yes, of course it can.  It has the control over the root zone, and it
can make approximately any policy it likes about delegation from
there, for the same reasons that any zone operator makes those
policies.  If ICANN wants to make rules about strings in $language,
and how it will treat those strings when making policy evaluations, it
can go nuts.  It can decide that it will not make delegations using
any string that contains the letter "q" for all I care.

But whatever that string is and whatever it means in whatever language
was under consideration, that's not the "semantic meaning" of the
_domain name_.  I'm aware that some people think this is a pointless
distinction, but the failure to have made it in the past is how ICANN
(from what I've heard, in the person of one of its former CEOs) ended
up leaving people with the impression that "variants" would "work",
even though it was never technically possible to make such a policy
for the whole Internet.  We are more than 10 years into the
tragicomedy that resulted from such promises, and it's more than a
little depressing to me that we're still at the stage where people do
not automatically repeat, "There is no semantics to a domain name," as
soon as the idea is floated.

> 2. Can the "ICANN community" make policies regarding which strings they will delegate?  What are the degrees of freedom under which they can make them?
>

No idea.  The distinction between the ICANN community and ICANN Inc
seems to me to be a problem a long way distant from the decision to
delegate a domain name by some administrator.  I think this is a
matter of how policies are developed inside ICANN, and it's all long
before the issue of what a domain name means.

> 3. Milton might argue that there should be complete freedom to propose any string you'd like, and it should be accepted.  Do you agree with that?  (Does Milton?)
>

I certainly have no intention of speaking for Milton.  If _I_ had my
druthers, there would be complete freedom to propose any string with
the guarantee that the answer would be no, but I'm not trying to make
policy here.  I'm trying to draw a distinction between ICANN making
policy for consideration of strings in the DNS, and ICANN delegating
things in the DNS.  Those are different activities, and one of them
has no resulting semantics.

> 4. Under what conditions, if any, should the semantic content of a natural language string be grounds for refusal to consider it as a new gTLD, in any future nGTLD round?
>

If you're going to talk about meanings of a string in some natural
language, then you're already outside the DNS.  That's the _whole
point_ of what I'm saying.  Names in the DNS happen to get used in
natural language all the time.  For those users of language, the
domain names almost certainly have semantics.  This is true even
though, in the name "ns1.example.com.", neither "ns1" nor "com" is a
word.  But keeping the semantics outside the domain name system, and
then allowing ICANN itself to figure out however it wants to decide
that someone else has made meanings for the strings it needs to worry
about when delegating, are a long way from talking about the "semantic
meaning of a domain name".  For instance, suppose I wanted to delegate
really_offensive_string.crankycanuck.ca.  I'm the registrant of
crankycanuck.ca.  This is just none of ICANN's business, and I think
you'll agree that it isn't.  There _certainly_ are people who have
suggested that ICANN should get into regulating that by contract.  If
the ICANN bylaws discuss the meaning of domain names, then ICANN has
to start arbitrating meanings of strings anywhere in the tree.  If
it's about the use of domain names, then you automatically get the
protection of the delegation system of the DNS and you can quite
correctly say, "Not our baliwick."

> 5. The problem is that these strings are read by both computers and by people, and are processed very differently, with very different reactions.  Are we to ignore that?
> 

No, but we're not to privilege the political view over ICANN's
technical responsibility, either.  There is no damage that results
from saying "use in some natural language" instead of "meaning of a
domain name", except to those who want to use ICANN as a regulator of
the entire domain name system.  Since the whole system was designed
precisely to prevent such kinds of centralization, I regard that
particular damage as entirely salubrious.

> These are questions that will come up and will be important in the
>  future.  Do you think that there is unanimity regarding the
>  answers?  It doesn't matter what you or I believe if there is no
>  unanimity, because these questions will recur and the resulting
>  policies may not be what we or others might want.

I believe there is _not_ unanimity, because like others on this list I
believe that a number of people would like very much to make ICANN a
locus of contractual regulation of the Internet.  I think there is
unanimity among anyone who correctly understands the limited and
narrow but important and legitimate role for ICANN as the operator of
the root zone.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com