Ron Paul vs. RonPaul.com

[Truth_and_Liberty]

@John James

I agree with pretty much everything you said there in your opening distinction, Graham, and I actually appreciate the articulate way you laid it out. But my question then becomes: if you openly accept that ICANN is essentially an arm of government (an institution based in (and existent only as) opposition to libertarian principles), why/how is it that you can say we as libertarians have no quorum with its policy? If it’s an arm of government, are its “policy decisions” not by defintion “legal ones”?

That is not the distinction I made between law and policy. The distinction is not whether or not the institution is an arm of the government. It is whether the institution is a court - that is, an institution making a decision about who ought to have ultimate decision-making jurisdiction over a rivalrous good. I picked my three institutions I gave as examples - schools, drug-certifiers and hospitals - because these institutions can easily be imagined to be private or state-run. Either way, the libertarian has no opinion on the policy decisions those institutions make. The question of whether creationism is taught in schools is never answerable using libertarian principles, even when the school is an arm of the government.

@Graham Wright

I contend that the question “where should the domain name RonPaul.com point?” is a policy question and not a legal question.

Then why is it being ultimately decided by a legal institution, and enforced (or at least backed by) law, and ultimately the force of government?

Because all sides in the debate are operating with a pro-IP premise: that a domain name can be owned. So it is being treated as a legal issue when it is properly viewed as a policy issue.

This may be just a weird wording, but I think it’s pretty clear, (and you understand) that Ron Paul is certainly not arguing against IP policies of any kind. Quite the opposite. It seems you admit he is literally asserting IP rights and attempting to use those IP-infused policies to his advantage.

Indeed that is largely what this whole dispute among us sideliners is all about.

In his pro-IP mind he may believe that he is asserting IP rights. But when you are anti-IP you look at the conflict in a different way.

Suppose I download the film Avatar, burn it onto 100 DVDs to sell at a market, and then I get caught and sued by James Cameron, or whoever “owns the copyright” of the film. If you’re pro-IP, the conflict is about the pattern and who owns the pattern, and whether James Cameron’s ownership of the pattern makes my actions aggression. But if you’re anti-IP you see it differently. The conflict is really about the DVDs themselves, the physical objects. My argument would be that I own the DVDs because I created them using my own property and labor. Cameron’s argument is that he owns the DVD because they have “his” pattern on them. From the anti-IP perspective, it is literally impossible to have a conflict over an idea/pattern/name, because ideas are non-rivalrous. “IP disputes” are always really disputes over physical objects.

I’m not supporting Ron Paul in his claim. I’m defending him from the accusation that he is “using government to steal from his supporters”. I consider that a mischaracterisation.

But there’s only two aspects to that that you could object to. (1) That he’s not really using government. We’ve seen this one tried multiple times throughout this debate on the interwebs. Even by Lew Rockwell himself. But most of us here, (and seemingly you as well) do not buy that argument and are not naive enough to believe that ICANN/WIPO is not essentially government.

So the only thing left for you to object to is (2) Paul is stealing from his supporters. It sounds as though you feel this is not the case because “domains can’t be owned”, so therefore there is nothing to “steal.” But if that’s the case, what is the dispute even about? It was my understanding that the domain holders/registrants/controllers, whatever we are calling them other than “owners”, have…well…control/access(?) to something that Ron Paul does not have control/access to. And he is attempting to get that control/access removed from their power(?) and placed into his…thus allowing him to do what he can’t do now, and preventing them from doing what they can do now.

Yes, it is (2) that I’m objecting to. He’s not stealing anything.

The RonPaul.com registrants don’t have “control” or “access” to anything. They are just in the position that ICANN is currently translating the name RonPaul.com into their website, rather than any other website. Ron Paul is not in that position, and he is trying to attain that position, and so he’s appealing to ICANN’s own policies on where domain names should point.

Yes. Is that not the standard anti-IP position?

Not to my knowledge. It sounds quite restrictive to me. The idea that something must be a “physical object” to be owned (i.e. for one to have property rights in it) bothers me. Some argue bitcoins fit the bill for non-physical property. I don’t see a reason airspace can’t be owned. In fact, you’d have to have a pretty weird/stretched definition of “object” even to make the case that land could be owned under your definition. Perhaps you are of the opinion one cannot own land, I don’t know.

To my understanding ownable property is largely dependent on that which is rivalrous and scarce. Being a “physical object” is not a pre-requisite to meet those qualities.

Instead of the word “object” how about the word “resource”? Something must be a physical resource in order for it to make sense to think of it being owned. Land and airspace are physical resources, so they can be owned. Do you disagree that being a physical resource is a prerequisitie of something being property?

Bitcoins are not a physical resource and in fact talk of “owning bitcoins” is a metaphor in a similar way to “owning a domain name”. It follows from AJ’s post on this, where he explains that Bitcoin (the protocol) should be viewed as a giant ledger, rather than a network of people “exchanging bitoins”, that thinking of bitcoins (the units) as something being owned is only a metaphor.

So for this conversation you’re defining scarce to mean simply ‘unique’? That seems odd.

A) Those weren’t even my words, I quoted Kinsella saying that in an earlier post.

B) Unique as in, it is a “unique identifier”, as in, only one person can use it in the network at a time, thus making it useful as an identifier. (Obviously if more than one person could use the same number at a time, it wouldn’t be very unique would it? It also wouldn’t make a very good identifier, would it?)

I thought it was weird when he said that, but I figured it was a slip of the tongue and gave him the benefit of the doubt (like when he said “contract with the internet”). I really don’t see what being unique has to do with whether something is ownable - the criterion is scarcity and that is not the same thing as uniqueness. You skipped my earlier questions: is the number 123 unique? Can I therefore own it?

rivalrous objects, over which conflicts about ultimate decision-making jurisdiction can occur. Do you consider domain names to be rivalrous objects?

A) I’ve stated so multiple times in this thread (on this very page, in fact), with the appropriate caveats, recognizing that the rivalrous/scarce nature is essentially due to the reality of a single master root server…making them in a way de facto scarce, not necessarily scarce in the sense that one’s body is scarce.

The effect of a single master root server is no to make something non-scarce into something scarce, or vice versa, or “de facto scarce”. That makes no sense to me. To the extent that it is true that there is a single master root server, it is that much more important that registrants get favorable interpretations of the rules from them. It does not turn anything from non-scarce to scarce.

B) If they aren’t, why in the heck is there a “conflict” in which “ultimate decision-making jurisdiction” is occurring right now?? What is all this even about if there’s no conflict?

There is no conflict over property, only disagreement about the interpretation of a policy.

What exactly do you think this conflict is about? Ownership of domain names? But isn’t a domain name a type of name? And isn’t a name a type of idea? And aren’t ideas unownable?

Again, as I’ve said multiple times, it may or may not be the case that a single master root server setup would be the norm in a free society. Clayton seems to think it wouldn’t. Others might argue it would be found by the market to be the most practical. I for one don’t know. I don’t presume to know how the market would work out such things free from the interference of government. For all we know technology would advance so fast that it wouldn’t even be an issue needed to be considered. I don’t know how anyone could presume to know such things. I find it rather audacious to make such assertions. But apparently some people feel comfortable in doing so and making claims as to how everyone would technologically communicate in a completely free society. shrug

And yet what you’re doing, by siding with the RonPaul.com registrants over Ron Paul in this case, and believing your opinion to be derived from your libertarian principles, is being presumptious and audacious. You are speculating that if the (state-granted) monopoly on domain-name-translation didn’t exist, the free market institutions (or institution, if consumers prefer) would have a policy that would suit the RonPaul.com registrants, therefore you will side with them. The same as speculating that in a free society, most schools wouldn’t teach creationism, therefore you don’t think the government schools should teach creationism. A person is not being unlibertarian by saying government schools should teach creationism, any more than you are being libertarian by saying they shouldn’t. It’s the premise that’s unlibertarian.