a) The root source of the possibility of this conflict - and there are zillions of such conflicts every year - is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. To be more precise, it is the nature of the Top-Level Domain structure dating back to the days of ARPANet, whereby names were simply assigned on a non-economic basis. As always, government is inevitably involved wherever there is mischief.
b) There are long-run technical solutions to this problem which may, one day, be adopted if we are ever lucky enough to see the expansion of freedom and liberty around the globe. The problem is precisely analogous to that of assigned leaders, versus natural leaders whose leadership is recognized rather than imposed. An attributive network would simply function on the basis of recognition… ronpaul.com directs to the Ron Paul because that’s what routers and users want… what Ron Paul wants or what pretenders to a ronpaul.com domain want is immaterial. Sure, it’s Utopia, but all the technical problems have been solved (certain components of Bitcoin, for example, already employ this kind of technology).
c) That said, we don’t live in Utopia. If you stole $1,000 from Ron Paul, he’d have to file a police complaint with the government (dun dun DUNNN) just like anybody else. And not all the rules are fair. But it’s unfair to ask libertarians to never use the unfair rules in their own favor… after all, we are all victimized by the same unfairness. A friend of mine commenting on the disbarring of a lawyer for fundamentally unjust reasons - even though everything was “by the books” - was that the lawyer in question knew what the (admittedly, fundamentally unfair) rules were that he chose to break and he voluntarily chose to bear the consequences of this when 1) he got to the bar and 2) broke the rules.
d) Thus, it is not necessarily unfair to be called to account for breaking unfair rules that everybody else has to abide by. Yes, it’s distorted but this is, in fact, the way that all of us live day-to-day, dealing with absurd traffic tickets and unfair tax laws and economic regulations of all kinds. We “pass the buck” of civilly-accepted-unfairness on to the next guy, so to speak.
The question here is whether Ron Paul is or is not entitled to the domain under the rules as they are, not as we imagine they ought to be in Utopia. Paul has filed with this commission and I think that the appropriate course of action is for the owners of the domain to disengage from a PR battle and, instead, make a better offer to Dr. Paul. If they’re sure he’s wrong according to the rules-as-they-are, then it looks like it will be Dr. Paul who will need to make a better offer.
I fully sympathize with the frustration of the domain owners. They were “the first to use” this domain. I would be upset if I was in their shoes. But, at the same time, they walked into it knowing these are the rules. It is silly for them to expect special treatment from Ron Paul on the basis of imagined Utopian ideals and it is downright childish for them to go into this PR attack. If they have a good case, they should make that case in the appointed forum, regardless of the fundamental unfairness and stupidity of the TLD system run by ICANN, which is irrelevant to the dispute at hand. I wish them luck and I think if they play their chips right they may actually be able to secure a reasonable purchase price for the domain-name… but I think they shot themselves in the foot in this regard by opening a PR battle.
Clayton -
