Re: ISPs as stakeholders

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Tue, Dec 02, 1997 at 09:34:30AM +0000, Jim Dixon wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Dec 1997, Kent Crispin wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Dec 01, 1997 at 10:45:20PM +0000, Jim Dixon wrote:
> > [...]
> > > *	CORE's byzantine legal defenses get dismantled:
> > 
> > Just out of curiosity, what happens to Nominet if someone lands a 
> > successful $100,000,000 lawsuit against it? 
> 
> It goes out of business.  
> 
> Because it is operating an important monopoly, I suspect that the 
> courts would turn over its assets (cash, equipment) to the successful 
> plaintiff, and then organize some legal successor.
> 
> What happens when a water company is sued successfully?  Do people 
> just not get any more water until another company lays new pipes?

Perhaps, if the judge says so.  This is unlikely in the case of 
heavily regulated public utilities, of course.  But heavily regulated 
public utilities have all kinds of special characteristics.

> > What happens to name registrations if CORE is crushed by a lawsuit, 
> > or is enjoined from undertaking more registrations because of the 
> > actions of a single registrar?  What happens to the stability of the 
> > net if some court in Virginia is persuaded that CORE should be 
> > prevented from distributing whois information, or zone updates?
> 
> Believe it or not, the Net will continue functioning whether or not
> people can register names in .firm and .store - or is it .shop?

In a narrow sense "The Net" will also function perfectly well with no
DNS at all.  However, the registration of new names *is* an important
component of the net, especially of doing business on the net, and if
it were terminated for any significant length of time real damage
would be occur. 

> You seem to be suggesting, not arguing, that CORE should have a special
> legal status, 

No.  I, as a citizen of the most lawsuit-crazed nation on earth, 
would rather place CORE out of the reach of insane frivolous 
lawsuits, and let the registrars that do business in the US carry the 
burden of legal exposure.

> or perhaps that their byzantine legal appartus is
> justifiable because the normal legal system doesn't recognize CORE's
> overwhelming importance.

You have this funny notion that the CORE "legal apparatus" is
signifcantly more "byzantine" than that of any other international
non-profit corporation.  It is not.

[...]

> Nominet's solution is to run their business well and trust to the legal
> system.  This is in fact how most of the world's vital resources are run:
> hospitals, airports, railways, power plants, water companies.

This is absolute bizarre nonsense.  The legal environments surrounding
hospitals, airports, railways, power plants, water companies are
VASTLY more complex than that of CORE. 

> On the other hand, I personally do not understand why anyone would do 
> business with a company that operates behind such elaborate legal 
> barriers.

You must live in a cave somewhere, then.

This "elaborate legal barrier" argument of yours is simply a vacuous
fixation.  You could just as well assault the whole net for it's
immunity to lawsuit.  I mean, why can't you sue the internet?  Isn't that 
a terrible thing?  

Furthermore, end-users do business with a registrar, not
CORE.  They can sue the registrar.

Finally, if the end-users don't like the legal environment surrounding
CORE they can vote with their feet.  If nobody registers names in the
CORE database it will go out of business. 

> In its present form no one has any remedy if CORE misbehaves; 
> they have to trust to the honesty of a group of entrepreneurs who do 
> business out of an impregnable fortress in a far-away land.

Yeah, just like we have to trust the honesty of the root name server 
operators. 

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html