Re: ISPs as stakeholders

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Wed, Dec 10, 1997 at 03:20:19PM -0500, Dave Crocker / IMC wrote:
> At 07:07 PM 12/10/97 +0000, Jim Dixon wrote:
[...]
> >Those Americans love to sue one another.  Why are you jacking up their
> >legal bills?  Why are you exporting all of these legal disputes to Europe?
> 
> They are NOT all being exported for all disputes.  Not even close.

This is an important point.  Remember that the model for CORE is that
tiny company (can someone remind me its name?) that provides 800
numbers to the phone companies.  It is *not* the target of lawsuites,
as a general rule -- customers take up their disputes with the phone
companies.  So, in practice, only a tiny fraction of disputes would
involve CORE.

One could try to quantify that fraction:

Jim has stated that 97% or so of .com registrants are located in the
US.  Probably the vast majority of costumers will deal with a
registrar in their own country, so registrar-customer disputes can be
handled in US courts.  Extrapolating slightly, I expect that customers
in other countries will tend to use registrars in their own countries. 
So virtually 100% of registrar-customer disputes will be handled in a
local jurisdiction.  (And arguably, a customer in the US who uses a
registrar in the UK, for example, should realize that their options
for lawsuits are constrained, and we needn't concern ourselves about
their free choice.)

For local jurisdiction registrar-customer conflicts there is no 
reason to involve CORE at all, since the registrar can cause any 
change to the CORE database that has any meaning for the case.

Given Jim's 97% figure, conflicts between two customers will be within
the US jurisdiction about 95% of the time (97% squared).  Thus roughly
95% of registrant-registrant disputes will be within US borders, and,
once again, there is very little reason to involve CORE, since the
registrars involved will be under the same jurisdiction.

So something less than 5% of all disputes will cross jurisdictions -- 
probably a lot less, depending on what fraction of disputes are 
customer-customer disputes.  These are the disputes where there is 
any reason to involve CORE at all.

So the fraction of disputes that could involve CORE is really rather 
small, and almost all disputes will be resolved locally.  Thus Jim's 
argument that Americans will face vastly increased legal costs is 
specious -- legal costs on average will remain about the same.

But there is a FAR more important reason why Jim's argument is
specious: By far the vast majority of disputes that might involve CORE
are across jurisdictions -- they are disputes that cross national
boundaries.  There is absolutely NO justification for giving Americans
an advantage in cross-jurisdictional international disputes -- none
whatsoever.  International disputes clearly need as close to an
impartial international forum for resolution as we can find.  

>From the point of liability, it is far more fair to give both parties
an equal shot at CORE...

To summarize:  The only disputes that are at all likely to involve 
CORE are those that are international to begin with.  Thus, CORE 
should be located in a jurisdiction appropriate for international 
disputes.  Almost all disputes between Americans will be resolved in 
America, and thus the location of CORE is immaterial to Americans.

-- 
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