Sure, it's chaotic, but we only had 3,000 people from North America vote in this election. And we're talking about a group that has communications possibilities well in excess of anything that was imaginable to people in the 1780s.

And what's wrong with moving slowly? We're in a whole new environment.

How do you think ICANN should handle the addition of new top-level domains, which may be the first piece of policy you have a hand in?

ICANN should be in the business of giving away top-level domain slots -- not names, but slots. A slot is a chance to put the name of your choosing into the root zone. ICANN should not look at the semantics of that name whatsoever. ICANN should be absolutely blind to the meaning of that word in any given language. All ICANN should do is check to make sure that the name is not being used already.

Secondly, ICANN should keep its hands absolutely out of the way the top-level domain is operated. It should allow them to go out of business. It should allow them to impose their own charters at their own choosing. If someone gets a slot and wants to call it "foo" and only include Web sites about "foo" birds, that's the business of foo's top-level domain. ICANN should not try to be a policeman of charters or anything else.

How many names should there be?

We can easily handle 10,000 top-level domains per year. By actual experiment, I've determined that the domain-name system can technically hold at least 1 million top-level domains with no problems whatsoever, probably many times that.

Should companies get any protections from ICANN?

No. There are existing trademark laws that they can use. What the trademark people want is fast recourse. They don't want to have to go to Brazil, which happens to have a domain they want; and they've gotten this and more. But why should we give trademark people this speedy access to supernational jurisdiction? I'd rather let the law evolve along the lines that it evolved over the past 2,000 years, which is by trial and error, finding out what works a case at a time.

The legal system has these techniques. And of course, there will be injustices along the way, but we already have plenty of injustices with the UDRP. And what's more frightening is that the whole ICANN legal system doesn't have the same checks and balances that the true legal system does. The true legal system is very much aware that it makes mistakes: It has notions of review, of overturning prior judgments. It's all built into the system. But ICANN doesn't have any of that.

Sounds like a libertarian stance -- are you in fact a libertarian?

Not really. I'm very much in favor of strong government regulatory regimes when there is a need for them. I've read a fair amount of history -- particularly the history of the U.S. since the Civil War -- and it is clear to me that the development of the regulatory state was a good thing and well justified by the abuses. I don't see that those abuses have waned, and thus there are still good reasons for strong regulatory bodies.

That said, I do recognize that there is value in recognizing that there are areas in which nongovernmental coercive forces -- such as Adam Smith's "invisible hand" -- are still a valid, and even preferable, alternative to a governmental regulatory body.

In the DNS space, it's my feeling that ICANN should limit itself to handing out lots and lots of slots in the root zone and let the operators of those slots run them as they please. It's my feeling that this is an area in which we can allow nongovernmental and nonregulatory forces to work (in conjunction with the preexisting legal framework that penalizes things like defamation and trademark infringement).

In the I.P. address allocation area, I take the reverse point of view -- that a strong regulatory body, and ICANN, are indeed needed. I don't think in the I.P. address area that economic forces will produce a solution that is good in terms of being open to new entrants or future flexibility of the Net.

And as for ICANN's third role -- protocol parameters -- that's simply a useless appendage to ICANN. It reminds me of something that Dickens came up with -- the Circumlocution Office -- a governmental entity with no positive function but that took it upon itself to make sure that no other governmental entity could do its job. I tend to feel that ICANN ought to lop off its useless "protocol parameter" appendage. I wouldn't call that "libertarian"; I'd call that rational.

Ultimately, do you really think you fight the system while working within it?

Of course. If I didn't believe that, I'd be fighting ICANN's systems tooth and nail. But I'm afraid of the vacuum that would result if ICANN were to disappear completely.

Where do you see the organization going?

I believe ICANN was given two distinct and contradictory roles, one of which was to establish itself, the other of which was to try to come up with policies regarding domain names. ICANN is a new experiment in international government. There's no source of authority for that. The only place it's going to come from is historical acceptance, and the only way it's going to get that is by doing things that are right, so that over time, people say, "You know, ICANN's doing the right thing." They'll just come to accept it, and ICANN will grow to power by that means. To do that, you have to get people to accept the decisions and to accept that they've had a meaningful participation. So to me, ICANN's race to put policy into place without creating the structural integrity and trust was a complete error. And it's suffering from it now. No one trusts ICANN anymore, and it may not be recoverable. I'm going to try to recover it. It also means maybe we have to throw out a lot of what's been done and start all over again, with everybody involved this time. It's a brave new world.

The Free Software Project
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