[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] The message to the community (was Re: Cancellation of RDS PDP WG meetings at ICANN62)

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Thu, May 10, 2018 at 12:36:08PM +0000, nathalie coupet wrote:
> Weren't we set up for failure from the start?

I don't think so, no.

> Whenever there is a conflict of
> jurisdiction, only States can resolve the issue.

This wasn't a conflict of jurisdiction.  It was a conflict of
desires, in which a group of people who traditionally had free and
unauthenticated access to a pile of data wanted that to continue while
another group of people wanted to prevent anyone from having access to
any of the same data.  Nobody appeared willing to concentrate on the
basic functions we are supposed to be supporting, and people kept
piling up more and more evidence about how they were right.  And, as
near as I can tell, too few people were willing to stop thinking about
everything in terms of how they do it now.  (This is still true.  The
"Calzone model" still talks about the "display" of information, which
is literally only a thing if you are imagining solely in terms of the
port 43 whois protocol and the associated terrible web services.  It
appears that virtually nobody writing technical policy in the ICANN
community has even the remotest familiarity with the underlying
technology any more.  That ought to be alarming to us.)

We could have done a different job of it, but we were unable to come
together to achieve that and therefore we failed.  Had we come up with
reasonable policies, I think there is plenty of evidence that various
governments would have lined up to support such policies.  We can't
blame this on the GDPR or the conflict of jurisdictions or anything.
We did not do what we needed to.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com