The reason for this is because policy-making is like a two-headed Janus, looking in different directions, half of which is toward fundamental values, while the other half aims at process, or the means to an end. Since ICANN in terms of governance does not yet know what are its fundamental values, policy-making at ICANN reduces entirely to process, which is politics, but nothing else. ICANN’s governance problem isn’t one of identity, as in “Who Am I”? ICANN’s policy and governance problem is “Where Is Here“?

Here’s why that’s the case. The so-called Internet Governance Project (IGF) published a paper in 2005 titled “What To Do About ICANN: A Proposal For Structural Reform”.  The Report can be viewed here: According to IGF:

“ICANN makes global public policy in a number of fields. It makes competition policy by controlling business entry into the domain name registry market and by determining the market structure of that $2 billion industry. It engages in rate regulation, setting the base price for the majority of the world’s wholesalers and retailers of generic domain names. It makes intellectual property policy by defining and enforcing global “laws” regarding rights in domain names. Indirectly, ICANN affects freedom of expression, because its rules on trademark protection in domains set limits to public use of words, and its rules regarding registrant data are intended to make anonymous expression on the Internet impossible. Many would say that ICANN also engages in taxation: it imposes per-domain fees on domain name registries, and the fees have grown sharply over time…

“Like all self-regulatory agencies, ICANN’s processes reach an impasse when there are fundamental disagreements among stakeholders. As a result, it has been almost impossible to change policies that were put into place at ICANN’s inception, before any real representational structures existed. This has favored ICANN’s staff and the U.S. Commerce Department [which] exercised great influence early in ICANN’s history.”

In contrast with the Internet Governance Project and the Internet’s core (or fundamental) values, we see that “core values” amounts to a consensus among informed people as to the following values definitions: namely, open standards,, tolerance, transparency, collaboration, freedom of expression across borders, national sovereignty and a border less world, inter-connectivity, cooperation, network of networks of informal contacts.

Internet Core Values In The Internet Governance Forum

Now fast forward to the fourth meeting of the Internet Governance Forum held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, in November of 2009. The theme of the conference was “Internet Governance – Creating Opportunities for All“.  Consider and then listen to this workshop titled  Workshop On Fundamentals, Core Internet Values here and which illustrates ICANN’s problem.

Listening to the online transcript (which I recommend) is a fascinating example of how a well intentioned group of people, all of whom, I am sure, are interested, interesting and well-motivated people, disclose that they do not have a scintilla of agreement among them as to what exactly are Internet fundamentals. On the full audio tape, we see how the “conversation” gradually slows and then breaks down almost entirely as the participants try to grapple with “core values”.

The buzzwords from the various speakers all there: open standards,, tolerance, transparency, collaboration, freedom of expression, and so forth. And, yet, as the workshop progresses it dissolves (near the end) into confusion and gibberish about what exactly the Internet’s  “core values” actually are. There apparently is no consensus about anything relating to values from those who presume to have answers about core values.

What they all have in common, however,  is that all the participants, thoughtful though they are, are nonetheless elites with elite interests about how the Web ought to be governed. Would one not think that after more than a decade of ICANN, the Internet’s would-be “governors” would have at least some sense of  their core mission? That’s clearly not the case from the perspective of the outcome from the IGF core values workshop. “Where Is Here”?

So much for core values, which is not to say to say that Internet governance problems are simple. They are not simple, as the governance project’s structural reform paper published in 2005 points out. Democracy is untidy, to say the least.  And, if there are no core values, except those that were there by default, such as “openness”, whose core values do the reformers and governance acolytes represent?  The Internet’s core? Not a chance. Elite interests represent only themselves. They might be well meaning. But they do not “represent” the Internet. Nor do other would-be elites who chase around after conferences, generally with someone else’s money, represent “the Internet”.  They represent themselves only.

For most people, in fact arguably the entire world except for the self-ordained people who clearly have no consensus about Internet values, the question of values and governance dissolve  into meaningless jargon when compared to the only possible value that the vast majority of people actually care about, which is that the Internet “works”. Or, at least it did work in the ontological sense before elite interests reduced governance into a muttering jazz because most of the contemporary problems about governance were invented by the elites themselves, generally by meddling into something (the Internet network of networks)  that actually and voluntarily worked quite well before ICANN came along.

ICANN’s Core Values Are Inimical To Internet Values

In the end the governance problematic in connection with ICANN in particular reduces to that which systems theorists refer to in connection with organizations and the human behaviors that occur within “closed systems”, is entropy.  What’s entropy?  With a nod to Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, “things fall apart”. That is, when the little and big things in a system are dysfunctional, such as arguments over governance without even an intimation of agreement about core values, we see that like an egg on a wall that has a great fall, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, cannot put ICANN together again. As Gary Felder puts it in connection with the entropy principle:

“Your kitchen floor is covered with bits of egg shell, yolk, and egg white in a large puddle by the counter. A moment later the yolk and white run together into one place, the bits of shell fall in around them and form a smooth surface surrounding all the liquid, and finally the whole mess soars up onto your counter, ending up as an intact egg. You leave a cool cup of water on the table and a few minutes later the water has gotten warmer but several cold ice cubes have coalesced out of it. A mass of dandelion spores flying about in the wind all land in nearly perfect unison on the same plant, attaching themselves to it in a spherical ball”. ICANN is a like a movie wound backward. We can see from the vantage point of time that ICANN entropy, lets call it governance paralysis, stems from an egg broken to begin with. Little Internet problems might be fixable, like domain front running or Whois lookups; but, the big stuff of governance just can’t be done.

Like an Internet Wayback Machine where we can’t turn back the clock, we see that when the big stuff of governance happens, say, like handing out in a laissez faire manner top-level access to the root zone by anyone with enough cash to want one, there are prescriptions for Internet disaster, because once they are institutionalized, privately-branded TLDs, like the global domain name scam before it, can not be turned back.

As we peel away at layers of contradiction we see that ICANNs dysfunctional governance reduces not so much to intentions, as if ICANNs constituencies intend to screw up the Internet; but, rather, that ICANN’s inability to deal with the larger governance matter related to legitimacy and consent simply stems from its failure to contribute in any meaningful way to the larger organization (or Internet system) that ICANN would have us believe it represents.

Why is this the case? The reason for the gibberish in the Internet Governance Forum highlights one of the essential contradictions that inform legitimacy and consent.  To date there’s simply no agreement about Internet values because, if the Internet has core values beyond its above-referenced original and defining characteristics like “openness” and actual participation, it is because the elites interests who presume to represent Internet core values, meaning its constituencies, in the end represent only themselves and their own values. Therein lies the ultimate contradiction. ICANN does not know what its core values are, with one exception.

ICANN in the end is and was the artifact of a U.S. telecommunications hegemony obtained through “technical” oversight of the Internet root zone and, had the Internet “governors” been wise enough, they would have left it there. However, they were not wise enough and, thus, ICANN is in the end a mere reifying apparatus that reproduces a “Ghost” in the machine: a ghost that purports to be able to convert into core Internet values something that is actually anchored deep within the American world view, which means, as Jonathan Wineberg points out, that ICANN values are inimical to global Internet values.

It is not as if the U.S. view of the world is “bad”. It isn’t bad, or “good”. Its about “values”. Core values. And, thus, the U.S. Government’s vision of values, which are a laissez-faire version of “openness” percolates downward into every nook and cranny of governance within ICANN. When it comes to reconciling ICANN with traditional Internet values, we see that that ICANN from its very inception was hostile to those values. As Weinberg describes it in Duke University Law Journal here:

“ICANN’s exercise of authority [has always] looked, walked, and quacked like public regulatory power. This raised a crucial hurdle for ICANN to surmount in any quest for public legitimacy: Was its exercise of this power consistent with our usual thinking about public power and public policy making? American political philosophy is built around a public-private distinction in which private actors presumptively have control over their own resources, but it is problematic for them to control public resources. A private entity wielding what amounts to public power may be subjected to constitutional restraints designed to ensure that its power is exercised consistently with democratic values. This issue resonates in politics and public policy as well as law: ICANN was unlikely to win public acceptance in democratic nations if it could not answer the charge that it was exercising policy making authority in a way inconsistent with core democratic values.”

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I have decided to ask persons who are publicly critical of these posts to rationalise their objections. This seems fair. I have noticed that the few private memos I receive are uniformly positive. All the public ones are almost uniformly negative, as if to embarrass me. I find this curious.

Here’s a review of objections posted to the list:

My friend, Jonny, is “a patient man” who (if I properly understand him) wants me to get to the point. One other person besides Jonny believes the posts are long winded.  The general purposes of the posts are in the first sentence of the first line and/or the first paragraph of  the first post and all other posts since then: (a) Expose the layers of deception behind the global domain name scam. (2) Identify ICANN as the entity ultimately responsible through mismanagement for the scam. (3) Posit the idea that, because of the scams, it is useful and feasible create a global safe place to mitigate scams and that such can be done by creating an equivalent TLD layered across the public Internet. (4) A regional electronic common market will be useful for the pacific island nations from the standpoint of electronic commerce and also because the PINs and Oceania are marginalized by the Internet and, thus, their sheer remoteness is good location for a global safe place, which will also vicariously bring people around the world to observe and discover the islands and, in doing that, help local artisans, artists and small manufactures.

My friend, Keith, believes I am culpable for a variety of misdeeds, at least one of them being ignorance (because Keith “knows more” than me about ICANN). Keith also believes in a single root for the Web (which is fine with me) since I have not mentioned the utility (or lack thereof) of a single root. Keith also believes I make things up, meaning inaccurate statements. I invite Keith to identify and explain with specificity the precise errors of fact. If he does that I will research each item and if I’m wrong I will rescind or redact or clarify a factual inaccuracy. If he can’t do that he ought not complain.

My friend, Will, believes that since the subject matter is “complex”, words like scammers and parasites are invectives and that the Pacific is no place for such words. I generally object to censorship, (as I previously said) but Will does make a secondary point worth mentioning. The acronym ICANN stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names And Numbers. That’s “numbers” and “names”. That’s ICANN’s purpose. Numbers are unambiguous. Names are words. Words are important. They matter. Domain names are also words. Unhappily, the Web (whatever else it also does and while its virtues are many) has also become a cesspool of  infinite replication as well as a global destination infested with serious fraud, theft of identities and bank accounts, copyright and trademark infringement, apparently never-ending pornography and, now, organized crime.

I have argued that the rightful inhabitants of the cesspool are, indeed both scammers and parasites. Whereas censorship (to be sure) constraints new ideas and, thus, I object in general, there are alternatives to the scams which are obvious and everywhere in connection with domains in particular and thoughtful regulation in general. ICANN has done almost nothing whatever to deal with domain scams. And, its not as if  ICANN has no policy options. It either declines to exercise its actual options, or perhaps it can’t. The bad guys are out there and  point-to-point connectivity requires policies for the good of the Internet; not to enrich ICANN which is without any legitimacy to do anything, but nonetheless arrogates unto itself the power to decide who shall (and shall not) have access to the root zone singularity.

A Gentleman recently posted a helpful suggestion that, perhaps, a blog-type format would be best. I agree with this and I have decided to honour the request. As to those who want or otherwise can not deal with anything other than ‘briefs’, instead of language that tries to thoughtfully and accurately deal with the “complexity” to which my friend, Will, refers; perhaps such persons should go read somewhere else.

In the next couple of posts I will deal with the issues of legitimacy and consent with respect to governance, both of which are critical for ICANN, and where it fails the most.
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Mission Improbable: The Quango Effect And ICANN’s Near Impossible Task

Creative destruction can be useful. Economist, Joseph Schumpeter, saw democracy and, indeed, what other economists refer to as radical innovation, as key to economic change. One can see this, for example, in the remarkable transformations we see almost daily in terms of  spinoffs from new technology and its corollary, creativity, both of which are  induced by the Internet.

Schumpeter said the following in his book titled The Process of Creative Destruction, published in 1942. “The opening of new markets and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as US Steel  illustrate the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one … [It] must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction; it cannot be understood on the hypothesis that there is a perennial lull.”

His so-called Gale Theory is an appropriate metaphor for ICANN. On the one hand, Internet dynamism finds expression in connection with technology, coupled with new forms of content expression. However, the gale theory metaphor becomes ironic in connection with ICANN because ICANN’s situation is an inverse mirror of radical innovation, meaning no innovation. ICANN is incapable of  real innovation from the standpoint of  governance. True, it has numerous “constituencies”, which is to say people who have stakes in its governance and policies. However, ICANN management remains top down and ultimately autocratic. This is because its constituencies are self-regulating. That’s not governance. It is hegemony.

ICANN also makes a big deal about consent. As if having meetings around the world and having persons from a variety of cultural backgrounds implicates consent from the Internet generally. What ICANN actually does is try to contrive acceptance, what Noam Chomsky refers to as “manufacturing consent”. ICANN is not very good at it. It’s policy outputs are divisive.  And, anyone with an ounce of critical judgment quickly perceives what ICANN is actually good at is trying to manipulate public opinion, such as, for example, with the ALAC (at large) group which, as Richard Henderson pointed out back in 1995, was “supposed to be for individual internet users, but individual internet users are barred from joining ICANN as individuals.” Nonetheless, some ICANN acolytes seem to a have an emotional stake in ICANN, even in the face of almost non-stop controversy and downright hypocracy. 

So: – What’s ICANN’s problem? Aside from its main problem, which is absence of authority, ICANN has what I have previously referred to as “a thimbleful of legitimacy in an ocean of ambition”. It’s governance contradictions are particularly visible in connection with its ambition versus actual authority. This also accounts for ICANNs unwillingness, or inability, or both, to deal with domain name scams. Why is this the case? Setting aside bad governance, its because ICANN it’s a “quango”.

What’s A Quango?

Literally, it’s a quasi non-governmental organization. The term, however, incorporates a variety of definitions but basically means an entity accountable and responsible to government but placed in the private sector. Quangos are generally funded by governments. ICANN is not funded by government. To paraphrase Daniel Defoe, ICANN is an unfortunate dog doomed to be miserable. Most, but not all, of it brought on by itself.

In terms of international governance, which is what ICANN aspires to, it fares even worse. An illegitimate entity,  it is neither private not public, notwithstanding the U.S. government’s official (current) stance on the matter of privatisation. It’s legitimacy crisis constrains the policy process. ICANN makes stupid governance mistakes, such as double dealing with Verisign to rip off domain registrants. ICANN claims its more open now, but such means nothing because self-regulation is both an oxymoron and a delusion.

More serious in terms of the Internet is the grief  ICANN creates for itself is in perpetuating the notion that its a democratic institution, notwithstanding self-regulation. In reality ICANN is a top-down and autocratic entity, run by its constituencies which are numerous, but nonetheless accountable to nobody but themselves.

However, ICANN’s foundation problem is anchored in the following language: “On July 1, 1997, as part of the Clinton Administration’s Framework for Global Electronic Commerce,(1) the President directed the Secretary of Commerce to privatize [my emphasis] the domain name system (DNS) in a manner that increases competition and facilitates international participation in its management.”

Technically, ICANN’s own “root zone” in terms of  legitimacy is a document tiled Management of Internet Names and Addresses, Docket Number: 980212036-8146-02, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). ICANN’s foundation document was published in the U.S. Federal Register on 20 February  1998 apparently after consultations with third parties.

Bingo! Mission Improbable. What jumps out is  legal language that contradicts common sense and is, thus, a thorn in the side of the Internet, although ICANN per se is a thorn because it chooses to be a thorn.

I mentioned this problem in a previous post, in connection with an essay from Matthias Hartwig,  in the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, in a book titled The Exercise of Public Authority by International Institutions. Arguably ICANN is international,but in ICANN’s case, what does that mean? As we peel away layers of contradiction we see by extrapolating from Hartwig, that ICANN’s governance problems derive from ‘bred in the bone’ constraints that make good governance highly unlikely.

First,, and as Hartwig mentions,“On the one hand, ICANN is neither an international organization, nor even an entity under international law, but a non-profit corporation  under Californian law. On the other hand, it administers access to the Internet and sets the standards around the world…”.

Second, and as Hartwig adds: “Although national governments are involved [with ICANN], they are formally reduced to an advisory role vis-à-vis  the organization. The roles are generally reversed in international law, private persons function as consultants only and it is up to the governments as representatives of states to make binding decisions. Under the standard model of international law an international organization or an international authority may set rules only after having been empowered to this end by [sovereign] states.”

ICANN Hostility To Traditional Internet Values

In other words, ICANN sings in its chains. And, its dual problems of legitimacy and consent are exacerbated by a third, and completely unyielding, constraint.  ICANN could certainly have changed its governance model. What it can not change is the fact that its connection with American political culture is, as Robertson Davies would say “bred in the bone”.

ICANN’s achilles heel is the ideology of the empire of business, anchored in historical impulses that drove America from the Mayflower forward. The impulses are: a) rugged individualism, b) mistrust of government, c) self-reliance, and (d) enterprise. Couple these with technology and, especially, American-style or “cowboy” capitalism, and we see in ICANN a rather poor imitation of what Schumpeter meant when he referred to radical innovation as the key to change.

ICANN may or may not be capable of change. What it can not avoid is the American liberal tradition and exemplified by among other things, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and everything implied by that nexus which is free speech.

Its existential dilemma is that it has no power whatsoever; it can do nothing outside of its mandate (which is non-existent beyond the technical realm of the Internet) and, yet, it presumes to be able to “regulate” the Internet, nowhere better observed as when ICANN decides who shall and shall not have access to the root zone of the public Internet.

In a lengthy and detailed analysis published in the Duke University Law Journal, and which neatly sums up ICANN’s dilemma. Jonathan Weinberg says of  ICANN that it is  “hostile to traditional Internet values”. Weinberg’s characterization fits ICANN perfectly.

I will explore ICANN’s hostility to traditional Internet values in my next post which will also deal with consent.

There are two parts to this post. Part 1 looks at complicity of the ccTLDs. Part 2 points out that the domain name scam  is a billion dollar boondoggle with no end in sight.

Ultimately the scam is a function of ICANN mismanagement which reduces to policy choices made by ICANN. In subsequent posts I will identify the methods used to perpetuate the scams. The thread or thematic link between all these posts is that ICANN’s present policy choices in connection with proliferating TLDs are harmful if left unchecked.

A secondary focus is to argue that one way to bring the matter forcefully to the attention of ICANN is to create an equivalent TLD that bypasses ICANN entirely; and, yet, perfectly resolves in the DNS root. The proposed TLD will also do the following: (a) create the framework for a sharable electronic common market for the pacific island nations (PINs) and (b) also create a global safe place where Internet end users can go to mitigate Internet fraud, identity theft, pornography, and unwanted advertising.

Part 1
Complicity of the ccTLDs in the global domain name scam

It’s worth keeping in mind that IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) is responsible for the creation and delegation of ccTLDs, described in Request For Comments (RFC) 1591. IANA is the overall authority for day-to-day administration of the Internet Domain Name System (DNS). The distinction between administration in connecton with DNS and ICANN’s management of the root zone and other policies, such as creating entitlements which are privately branded TLDs, gets lost in the miasma of ICANN acronyms that are enough to confuse anyone.

Nonetheless, when it comes to general matters of governance that intersect with domain names, sooner or latter the issues reduce to ICANN policies, or absence of them. Similarly, to begin to understand the scope of the global domain name scam and ccTLD complicity where appplicable, it is necessary to separate ccTLDs from the ccNSO.or Country Code Names Supporting Organization within ICANN. Nuance is important. The overall structure of ICANN is here:

The reason for separating the various governance units is to distinguish between the activities of   ICANN’s various supporting organizations in the overall acronym-infested layers of authority within ICANN, as well as clarify that  ICANN policies writ large are one thing, whereas the alphabet soup of confusing subsets such as ASO (Address Supporting Organization) which incorporates the RIR’s or Regional Internet Registries and in particular the RIRs, are entirely separate entities when it comes to ascertaining actual complicity in domain name scams.

And, as to the address supporting organization (ASO) within ICANN, it is worth noting in terms of the pacific island nations, that the original memorandum of understanding (MOU) dated 29 October 2004 that defined the triangular relationship between the ASO, the so-called Number Resource Organization (NRO within IANA responsible for the allocation of sufficient addressing spaces, and the regional registries, left it up to the RIRs themselves  to define their own regions “in a manner of their choosing”. The MOU said in effect that the NRO should ensure that “ all possible service areas” were incorporated. The MOU in doing that left out by default about 20 percent of the surface of the globe: in other words Oceania.

This initial  separation of authority between the RIRs and ICANN itself was and is  is critical because whereas the impetus for the RIRs stemmed from a realisation among the founding parties that IANA could not scale sufficiently to keep up with the global demand for IP addresses, it was also the case (as APNIC points out) that concentration of power, in the U.S. in this instance, could not be  reasonably expected to either understand or accommodate regional needs. (APNIC has posted a video on Facebook that outlines the creation of the RIRs.  

However, the most important and indeed pivotal aspect of the RIR arrangement with IANA and, ultimately, ICANN is this: whereas RIR governance is bottom up, consensual and driven by policies that accommodate regional needs as defined by the membership, ICANN governance is ultimately top down, autocratic, and driven by money.

As to the ccTLDs, not all Internet countries, broadly defined, participate in the country-code names supporting organization, which now numbers 113 member organizations. That’s 113 member organization within the 300-odd ccTLD delegations, about a hundred of which are unused and where many other active delegations in the root zone restrict end users users to level three names.

The origins of the ccTLDs process are a fascinating read, especially in connection with Jon Postel. The first in-country ccTLD delegation was dot UK , delegated before the release of RFC 920 (request for comments)  authored by Postel and Joyce Reynolds in 1984. Arguably, neither Postel not Reynolds could possibly have anticipated the broad transformation from what Postel originally referred to as “general requirements for a domain” into the present free-for-all anarchy loosely regarded as domaining which daily incorporates fraud, theft, trademark dilution, domain flipping, direct navigation, insane valuations and mindless “land rushes” actively promoted by many of the ccTLDs alongside their technical partners which are the registry operators.

And where Reynolds and Postel contemplated a simple and orderly process and responsible domain name management with a “responsible person to serve as an authoritative coordinator for domain related questions”, peeling away the present governance layers discloses the gradual evolution of an Internet scam on a grand scale characterized by the complicity of certain ccTLDs in never-ending litany of get rich quick schemes aided and abetted by registrars, resellers, monetizers, promoters, auctioneers,  name dropping services  and domain name arbitrage, (the latter which involves buying traffic and then sending it to a domain where someone performs a secondary  action that pays more than the purchased traffic), and all of them  ultimately reliant on lemming-like legions of domain speculators who (for the most part)  delude themselves that nothing, which is what they actually purchased in the form of a whois entry, will somehow transform into instant riches, always at the expense of someone else.

Moreover, that which enables the scamming  perpetuated by ICANN through inaction and (in fairness) tolerated by the RIRs, boils down to the following: domain names are not property even though the law in many countries treats them as such. So-called domaining is a “craze” that relies in addition to human greed on the premise and promise that ethereal (non-existent) goods can somehow transform into an“economic value add” or “eva” which in its simplest terms is the measure of surplus value created on  domain name investments where the eventual profits  are sufficient to compensate for the equity, in other words the money,  invested in (a) the cost of the domain opportunity in the first place and (b) the difference between that the revenue that results  when the name gets sold.

By that definition, meaning return on investment at the boittom of what ultimately reduces to multi-level marketing schemes, and modified Ponzi schemes, nearly all such investments in domain names are a waste both of time and of money.. And, even though domain name “investments” are typically small, one can see in the aggregate the overall size of the scam with a simple table of domain counts chosen at random(courtesy of Domain Tools).

Part 2

A Billion Dollar Boondoggle With No Discernible End

The dimensions of the scam can be readily seen from the figures in the table  Spread across the six top generic TLDs the figures show that over 380,000,000 – that’s three hundred and eighty million domains that were active, which is to say, “fully qualified”, have been deleted to date from the root zone; and, on any given day, about 77,000 additional domain names expire while at the same time just under 70,000 new and previously unregistered domains are added to the root.

Running a domain name registry or registrar (but not both, at least not yet) is basically a legal license to print money by selling what amounts nothing: an entry in a Whois lookup. Domain name sales are a huge and thriving business predicated on ethereal goods that for the most part are marginally valuable, have little staying power and in any case are never actually owned. The process goes round and round, day in and day out, year in and year out, fueled by a relatively close knit group of domain name registries and  legions of  ICANN-accredited registrars which are now in the hundreds according to ICANN’s registrar list.

As to the ccTLDs in particular, simply choosing at random any country code registry discloses the extent to which a registry and its registrars are complicit. The word “complicit” means that in particular the ccTLDs thast are “open”, which is to say do not have residency or business requirements as a condition of “owning” a domain name, reinforce the pathology because they are open and, thus, attractive to domain speculators.

The general mentality within the ccTLD community itself and which drives the domain name mind set, can be seen in an item titled ICANN’s ccNSO, That Was Then, This Is Now. The item here is instructive from the standpoint of giving what thr article refers to as  country code domain managers a voice and a platform within the ICANN community…and to help the industry grow around the world.”

ccTLDs that are open to all comers fuel the speculative bubble or “craze” which , like the Tulip ans bulb craze in Holland, amounted to prices that rose so quickly and so high that people began trading land, bank accounts and anything else in terms of liquidity , meaning cash, in order to acquire more tulip bulbs. This same pattern has always applied to crazes such as the south seas bubble, also in the 17th century, where the South Sea Company apparently had litle difficulty in convincing investors to put cash into a woithess company with  an IOU to the British government worth £10,000,000 with which the company had supposedly purchased the “rights” to all trade in the South Seas.

The South Sea Company bubble was a scam because the so-called rights that investors relied on  were non-existent. And, as with the present domain name craze, the “buuble” in its basic form relied then as now  on human emotions and, unfortunately, greed. In the case of domain names the bubble happens when investors, as in so-called domain name “land rushes”, place unreasonable demands on domain “names” such that demand drives up the cost beyond any reasonable or even rational apprehension of the thing’s actual worth. Inevitably, the bubble burts and investor’s lose, if not their shirts, then their cash.

The global domain name scam is an insidious variation on bubbles and crashes because, for one thing it happens on a daily basis; and, moreover, there is an apparently endless supply of english and foreign languages names out there for sale and upon which each and every new TLD subsequently feeds.

The process, in turn, is fed upon by legions of secondary scammers, specifically multilevel marketers that have transformed themselves  into multi-million dollar entities that in some cases are listed on stock exchanges and who now seek to influence the ICANN policy-making process at ICANN. A classic example of how the heart of the process evolves can be seen in connection with the so-called EOIs, invented by ICANN.

The EOI process, namely “expressions of interest”, allows various parties to lobby and otherwise influence ICANN policies. The lobbying process (the EOIs) allows and accommodates interests that basically have no legitimate connection whatsoever with Internet governance or the interests of the community at large. The players in this instance are generally, but not necessarily, based in the U.S. What they all have in common is an interest in perpetuating the global domain name scam, arguably with the complicity of ICANN ad many, if not most, ccTLDs.

A hint of the EOI process and the problems in raises for the Internet community can be observed here in a letter by Anthony van Couvering to ICANN’s (then) Chairman, in January 2010: In part, the letter states:

“ICANN’s value to the Internet has little to do with domain names, which may in the end turn out to be a passing fad; the interest in ICANN turns first and foremost on the question of whether it can be a model for fair and equitable Internet governance. In deciding the EOI question, in deciding whether it is truly going to move ahead to implement the community decision to implement new gTLDs, ICANN is choosing whether it wants to be part of the vital Internet, or a failed and naïve experiment.

“This EOI process seems at first a minor point, but ICANN, by its previous ambivalence  and cryptic ambiguity with regard to new TLDs, has invested in the EOI process the entire credibility of the institution as a venue for Internet governance. It could have been any other question of policy or rules, but it so happens that the course of Internet history has determined that it is on this question that ICANN will be forced to declare itself.”

In other words, “Which side are you on.” The community? Or ICANN and only ICANN? We will see in future posts how the influence of private lobbies in the form of a loosely coupled but effective aggregation of self-serving parasites whose only actual stake in the Internet is to milk the last drop of blood from a vast and prolific community of clueless individuals who either   don’t understand, or  don’t care,  about the fact that they have been and will continue to be, fleeced.