Re: Hijacked Domain Names--should be: Hijacked Network

["Thomas M. McGhan" <gill-simpson.com@mail.bcpl.lib.md.us>]

ON  Wed, 20 Nov 1996 23:17:19 -0500
IN A MESSAGE TO            "David R. Conrad" <davidc@apnic.net>
tor@wtv.net (Bob Allisat) SAID:
 
>  The United States government and it's
> laws or agencies including the NSF have
> *no* jurisdiction here in Canada where
>  I live nor the rest of 190+ nations of
>  the world. Whu do Americans continue to
>  imagine otherwise? The AlterNIC or my
>  envisioned FreeNIC or any other NIC all
>  are equal to InterNIC. All NIC's have equal
>  right and claim to existance and functioning.
 
Jurisdiction in Canada, or anywhere else is not a problem.  The 'net 
was developed by and for the US Government and it agencies
DOD, DARPA, etc.  and expanded to include US educational institutions 
and other extra-governmental entities.  The research and development 
funding, and deployment, were paid for by US taxpayers, along with 
some _v_o_l_u_n_t_a_r_y_ contributions from other individuals and 
organizations within the US.  If I choose to connect my computer to 
the network ( read internet ), and allow access without 
login/password registration or other encumbrances, have I surrendered 
ownership of my hardware ( CPU, disk drive, modem, etc.??)  The only 
'right' to have to access the internet is the collective grant by the 
owners of 
a)  the interconnecting communications facilities
b) the connected systems

In neither case was any unconditional permission 
granted to you, or anyone else, and there was certainly no 
transaction which conveyed any ownership rights to any tangible 
property.  A lease or license for limited use of communications 
facilities just gets you as far as the POP of the accessed host 
system.  It doesn't automatically give you any rights to anything on 
the system, especially not including any guaranteed right of access 
to any of the data stored there, html, text or otherwise.  The owner 
of the system can connect to the internet without putting anything on 
his system in the public domain.  'Public Domain', by the way, is not 
an accepted international legal concept in the area intellectual 
property law.  Although the way it is handled in the US is an 
approximate norm in many countries, conventions differ substantially.
This further underscores the point, made more effectively in other 
messages to this discussion group, that copyright, trademark, patent,
etc. law is far out of scope for IAHC, and will continue to be 
sources of contentious wrangling in courts all over the planet for 
the forseeable future.  IAHC should not attempt to compete with 
established legal remedies as a source of conflict resolution 
solutions for legal problems.  Voluntary binding arbitration assumes 
some degree of cooperative spirit between the parties. The adversarial
 process ( choose up sides, fight it out, have 1 winner, 1 
loser, winner gets his way, loser dies ) is clearly unsuited to this 
sort of design process.

In simple terms, what I am saying is, stop clobbering the US because
we were ingenious enough to create this wonderful entity, and generous
enough to share it with the world.  Are we to be considered greedy,
corrupt, etc. because we prefer to retain significant input into the
decision making process over future use and directions of this
marvelous toy?

If a symmetrically comparable position were constructed, one could 
fairly say that, since as a Canadian citizen, you have " *no* 
jurisdiction" here in the USA, you have no right to any input into 
the process, since INTERNIC, SAIC, etc. are based here and subject
to US Laws.  I do not accept either your assertion or its symmettric 
opposite.

  Besides, as a US citizen who lived in Iran for 18 months,
I still think of Canada as the guys who saved the lives of many 
Americans, at great risk to their own, by hiding them from the 
Ayatollah's thugs.  Remember the 'Thanks Canada' banners hung all 
along the New York border back then?   I still remember, but 
sometimes I wish there was just one little 'Thanks, USA' instead of 
this manifest inferiority complex from some few of our northern 
cousins.