Ron Paul vs. RonPaul.com

Miscellaneous General
61

So a domain is not a scarce, rivalrous good?

Um. The use of trademark law itself isn’t novel. That doesn’t make it ethical, just, or libertarian.

Lew Rockwell: Because the RP.com guys registered Ron’s name in Australia, the international arbitration option must be used. Yes, it is associated with the UN. Too bad, but one must play the cards one is dealt.

Robert Wenzel: He may not believe that the UN should exist or be an enforcing body, but if they are, that is the body he must appeal to. What is his alternative, to call the local sheriff in the county he lives in?

Sure sounds like that’s the case being made to me.

I addressed this.

Ah I see. So if the law is such that the President is entitled to murdering people at his discretion…why shouldn’t he?? Great legal positivist argument there.

You say “penance”, normal people might just say “asking price.” But to each his own. I suppose your grocier is pleased to receive such humility everytime you stop in for your Cheerios.

To quote you, So What?

Last time I checked, essentially suing someone is not “negotiating” anything. I think everyone pretty much agrees they’ve moved passed negotiations at that point. Unless of course you’re one of those who considers all those people in your police brutality video “negotiating” with who should get the shit kicked out of them.

No higher claim according to the rules of a monopoly system, supported by government force, with arguments based in trademark law. Got it.

Wha? You mean to tell me that if the system weren’t monopolized, more than one person/group could control “ronpaul.com” at a time?

Please. That’s carrots and pistachios. You clearly described a situation in which property was damaged. Please describe what property of Ron Paul’s was damaged in this situation. (And please don’t resort to attempting to claim Paul owns his name or reputation, or I think I’ll lose all intellectual respect for you. And I’m just not sure I’m ready to have to deal with that.)

I’ll have to ask you again: so a domain is not a rivalrous good? More than one person/group could control “ronpaul.com” at a time?

Um. Yeah. I kind of said that.

“Anarchist”, “voluntarist”…you say tomato, Paul says tomahto.

62

It’s really not - anyone can set up a DNS and it can have any domain-name mapping they like. Now, you can’t put a “rogue” DNS into the ICANN-approved DNS network because no one will forward DNS requests to your “rogue” DNS. But the point is that it’s not an inherently scarce good… whatever scarcity is there is the creation of ICANN.

The point is that Ron Paul is doing nothing extraordinary or bizarre… ICANN rules permit Macy’s to bump off someone besides the Macy’s who has registered “www.macys.com” and without paying some exorbitant price to secure the domain. The same logic can be extended - under ICANN’s rules - to very famous people like Ron Paul.

Well, I’ll drop this line of argument since I agree Lew’s remark re. not suing in US courts was weak and irrelevant.

Fine. My only point is that the HuffPo types need to shut their trap about Ron Paul using “the government” because it’s not true. Nothing in your post refutes this. ICANN is private. Its rules for the registration of domain-names are private. They have the right to write the rules any way they like, including bizarre loopholes - my example was left-handed people. It’s not unlibertarian to utilize any of those private rules - bizarre or not - because everyone who registers a domain agrees to the same rules. They voluntarily said “Yes, I understand I can be booted from this domain by a famous person with this name, but I’d like to register it anyway. Here’s $20 to register it for this year.”

It’s not positivist and your “analogy” is a total red-herring. Let’s say you go to a go-kart track. The rules are that you can rent a go-kart for $30 for one hour BUT anyone with a birth year that is the same as your go-kart number (let’s say they’re all 19xx) can pre-empt your seat. Now, that’s a weird rule. Can a libertarian born in 1979 sit around and wait for someone to rent the go-kart numbered 1979 and then pre-empt him out of it? Of course he can! Why the hell wouldn’t he? There isn’t anything even slightly unlibertarian about it. What was sold was a limited right to use the go-kart with the (admittedly bizarre) proviso that you can be pre-empted from your go-kart by somebody with a birthdate that matches the go-kart’s number. So, the go-kart owner is not aggressing against the renter by asking him to step out of the kart in preference to someone else - even though he’s already paid the $30. Neither is the pre-empter aggressing against the original renter as he’s merely requesting the go-kart’s owner to dispose of his own property in accordance with the rules by which he had rented it to begin with.

Now, ICANN is different in that the “ownership” is really hierarchical bullshit inherited partly from the old ARPANet system and partly from the universities. Hence, it is an inherently “IP-ish” kind of thing. But that’s the rub - the “renters” still agreed to these IP-ish rules and it is on the basis of these IP-ish rules that they are asking $250K. In asking for $250K, they are legitimizing the very rules which Ron Paul is utilizing.

ICANN is a private organization. The domain names are registered pursuant to their terms, which include the possibility of reassignment of the domain-name. This is another red-herring as there is no connection between police brutality and Ron Paul filing with an arbitration agency in accordance with ICANN rules (the very rules that the owners of ronpaul.com agreed to) to have the domain-name reassigned.

Exactly - in asking $250K, they’re also claiming right by these rules!

Sure, why not. Look at BitTorrent and magnet-URIs… you can have a zillion different versions of “Batman: Dark Knight Rises” and the correct content will be located according to your search parameters. OpenDNS permits as many different versions of DNS as there are people willing to run DNS servers. The packets aren’t routed by names, they’re routed by numbers (IP)… you can (and if you use Chrome, you do) cache DNS mappings to your own computer, basically making your computer its own DNS server! Or you can do the translation yourself. Try the following… assuming Windows (may not work if you have a heavy firewall): Start Menu->Run, type “cmd” and click “OK”, in the window that pops up, type “ping www.google.com” and press enter… You’ll see something like (but different): “Pinging www.google.com [74.125.129.106] with 32 bytes of data:” Type the ‘74.125.129.106’ part into your browser’s address bar. Press Enter or click “Go”. Pour champagne: you just did a DNS translation all by yourself!

OK, crappy analogy.

Clayton -

63

I understand your point about the natives owning the land and agree with it, but Ron Paul is not a “native” in this case. The domain name wasn’t his “property” or the property of his ancestors (at least to anyone’s knowledge). It’s not as if ICANN came in and took RonPaul.com away from Ron Paul and then sold it to the current owners.

Also, as far as “if you play by statute, then you get played by statute”, you can’t buy property without telling the state that you agree to its rules. (I suppose that you can, but then you will get the property taken away from you for not paying property taxes.) So, when a developer comes and lobbies the state for eminent over your property, it’s all gravy because you agreed to the rulez?

64

Clayton: “ICANN is a government-created entity whose job is not unlike the government sales counter for the parking lots above.”

Clayton: “ICANN is private. Its rules for the registration of domain-names are private.”

I don’t get it.

65

Well, it’s like the Federal Reserve in this respect - it is a government-created private entity. Trying to apply “libertarian rules” to the analysis of domain names is like trying to figure out how to run a “libertarian bank” under the Federal Reserve system: ludicrous. Given that you’ve opened a bank in the Federal Reserve system, you have to abide by the Fed’s absurd rules. That’s just how it is. Those rules are absurd ultimately because it is a government-created entity. But everyone who agrees to abide by those rules does so as a matter of contractual agreement. So, I see two separate issues:

  1. Do the ICANN’s rules make sense? If not, why not? (I think they don’t. I think the fact it is a government-created entity explains why).

  2. Do libertarians have to abide by ICANN rules? Is it aggressive for a libertarian to use ICANN rules to preempt another individual from a domain name he has been using for some time? (I think libertarians do need to abide by the rules and can use the rules to preempt others. I think the fact that ICANN is a private entity explains why, in part.)

Edit: I’m tired of this topic, BTW, so I probably won’t respond anymore in this thread. I’ve only written on it because it pisses me off to see the HuffPo types slandering Ron Paul as “going to the government to rip off fellow libertarians”. Criticisms on rational grounds by present company are completely within-bounds, but the MSM crap just irritates the hell out of me. Jonathan Goodwin has written the book on this issue, IMO.

Clayton -

66

Yes OK, Clayton. Providing your technical stuff is correct, and I have no reason to doubt it, I accept that you show that there is no libertarian answer to the situation. If in a free society there would be no obstacle to both RPCP [ronpaul.com people] and RP using the same domain name, then what RPCP has isn’t real property, and it would not be real property of RP either. However I should say it is doubtful that RP knows any of this.

Your libertarianism-compatible case for RP’s actions, certainly isn’t the case being made by the most visible supporters of RP. Bob Wenzel is actually making an IP case going on about how RP wouldn’t have any standing if RPC were registered by a different RP, but because it isn’t he has, which is laughable. And Lew Rockwell has name-called the RPCP as “squatters” for the second time now as if RP has any better claim to it than RPCP do. You explain yourself he doesn’t, and that any exlusive ownership of a domain is as arbitrary as the next.

It is a kind of a artificial gladiatorial arena where there is an ethical vaccuum and there isn’t a real libertarian answer to it, but unfortunately that is not what LR et all are saying. They’re making it out there is a good guy RP and bad guys RPCP.

67

Here ya go:

Stephan Kinsella - Ron Paul is using gov’t to steal from supporters

68

I listened to most of it. Most of Kinsella’s points are correct - and I completely agree with his statement that the whole system is a creature of government force - but he then makes the comparison between Ron Paul’s UDRP complaint and eminent domain. This is refuted by his own statement that the whole system is a creature of government force! It is generally the case that my ownership of a plot of land is not a creature of government force… it’s a creation of original appropriation and voluntary exchange. Thus, for someone to use eminent domain to seize it is an act of aggression, mediated through government. A UDRP complaint is completely different from eminent domain since the original “property” itself is no more legitimate than the UDRP complaint. Both are creations of the same government force, the same system of exploitation.

The idea of a “domain” is not some “natural” phenomenon that would occur no matter how the Internet had evolved. I’m not saying that its origins are sinister… they are not. The purpose to which ICANN/etc. are being used is precisely what Kinsella says… the US media empire is trying to foist the ICANN IP system onto the rest of the world. In response, the Internet has balkanized and now you have “.uk” “.de” “.fr” etc. Yet you can still reach those domains that are not controlled by ICANN. Just goes to show that the whole concept of needing an ICANN - or its equivalents in other countries - is a pure sham. Personally, I think the system will eventually break down because the desired end-goal of ICANN et. al. is technologically infeasible. You cannot actually control the routing of computer communications like you could phone routing. There’s just no comparison. The long-run virus that will kill this beast is cryptography… which the establishment is already demonizing as the “dark Internet”… like it’s some back-alley. All modern corporate remote computer connections are done over a VPN… which is “dark”. So, trying to say that Tor or Silk Road is a “dark corner of the Internet” is downright silly. If that’s the case, then what are corporate VPNs… secret spy infiltrations of the Internet??

Clayton -

69

What is “most”? Exactly what time did you stop listening?

I’ve seen it before when you admittedly do not go through a full presentation and then come in and make your response based on simply the fraction you’ve heard, or even worse, what you assume the argument to be. I realize when you’re sharp you can kind of get away with this most of the time (kind of like Molyneux does in talking about subjects he knows little about), but it can get you into trouble.

Great, so I assume you have no problem being hauled off to a cage for traveling at a velocity above an arbitrary limit.

Here we go again.

70

No, but I accept that I am assuming that risk every time I get on the government’s roads. The cop who pulls me over might even be a libertarian. So long as he is following the rules and avoids going into unconscionable behavior (using his de facto liberties to commit “justifiable” assault, etc.), he is doing nothing contradictory to libertarianism. His shoes will be filled by someone else, probably worse, if he were to quit. This idea of “pristine” libertarianism is ridiculous. I call it NAP-fundamentalism. It’s the same basic mentality of any fundamentalists… “the world be damned!” “let come what may!” As Thoreau so eloquently said, “That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” Men are not yet prepared for it. This is the time of John the Baptist. We need to prepare the way… because it is coming.

Clayton -

71

JJ, you are missing Clayton’s entire point.

  1. You have a unique username for the Mises website. It is not your property. The Mises Institute allows you to use that username for free. If they wanted, the Mises Institute could transfer your unique username to another person. You agree to follow the rules of the Mises Institute. If there is a process for something like this to occur, then you have to live with the results. You could always try to fight it, but ultimately it’s not your property.

  2. All the connections between computers and servers and the various types of connections are privately owned. There are different protocols for accessing computers that utilize those physical connections. Accessing Steam is different from accessing the WWW and accessing computers through FTP. Currently, if you access servers through the WWW, you have to use domain names registered through ICANN (though I guess not when in other countries). You don’t have to access other computers and servers through the WWW. You could use FTP or whatever floats your boat. But if you want to use the WWW, then you rent your domain through ICANN. You don’t own it. It’s their rules, just like the Mises Institute has its own rules for forum membership.

EDIT: Clayton already mentioned accessing other computers and servers through bittorrent. I thought I’d also mention Usenet.

72

Hmm, yeah, I think that ronpaul.com’s owners definitely aren’t bad guys here. As you said, it’s an ethical vacuum, unfortunately. Kinsella predicts Ron Paul’s bid for the domain will not succeed… if this is how it turns out, I certainly won’t shed any tears for Ron Paul. Unless one side or the other is absolutely certain they can win the case, probably the best thing to do is to go back to negotiating a price. Ron Paul’s negotiating position is considerably strengthened by virtue of having filed this complaint and perhaps that is its true purpose. $250K is pretty damn steep, maybe he might settle for something in the $10K-$50K range. Hopefully, we’ll see something in the news like, “Ron Paul and ronpaul.com have settled for undisclosed sum and a stipulated gag/NDA on the details of the exchange.”

Clayton -

73

Ah, so Paul is in the right because the guys “assumed the risk” that he’d use a statist apparatus to expropriate their property from them?

I’m sorry, traffic statutes are not contradictory to libertarianism?

Are you kidding? That’s basically what you’re advocating: “Hey man, this is just the way it is. These are da rulez. Makes no difference if they are unlibertarian and imposed in an unlibertarian way. Those guys agreed to em. Mah boi Ronny just be doin his thang. It’s all in the rulez bro. Can’t fault da good docta for using da rulez to his advantage, even if it means taking advantage of other human beings.”

74

No, apparently you don’t get it. Once again:

Put it this way: in a free society, there would be no reputation rights, no IP law, no trademark, no copyright, no right of publicity, so I doubt the private companies running the internet infrastructure woudl ever have a quasi-IP-based domain name dispute policy in the first place.

You are apologizing for Ron Paul’s attempt to actively use an illegitimate system to do someting illegitimate…basically just because he can. I see nothing in this entire argument that comments on the unlibertarian nature of the situation. All I keep hearing from the pro-Paul camp is “Dos are da rulez”. Again, you can claim ICANN is “private” all you want, but as even Clayton admitted, it’s about as “private” as the Fed…created through government, supported by government, largely (essentially) run by government, and basically backed by government.

And to claim Paul not only has a libertarian “right” to do what he’s doing just because it’s legal, or “dos are da rulez, (and ICANN isn’t a state so that de facto means they’re legitimate)”, is just nonsense.

Bottom line:

Is it fair to say that Ron Paul is using government to steal from his supporters?

Stephan Kinsella: “Yes.”

75

I don’t know why you think this strenghtens your argument. The LvMI own their website but ICANN doesn’t own the domains. As you so aptly noted yourself: “Apparently ICANN somehow owns all domain names without using them first.” LvMI is equally right in doing whatever they want with their accounts, but ICANN is equally wrong in doing whatever they do (if Clayton is right about the technology), so it is actually exactly the reverse example.

As I understand it the point is that in a free society a dispute like this wouldn’t arise in the first place, as RP would supposedly not be barred from setting up another site and mapping it to ronpaul.com, but is barred from it now by the state enabled ICANN. So the situation is why should RPCP hold a state-enabled monopoly privilege on ronpaul.com rather than RP? Since that kind of monopoly isn’t defensible, no person can have a better claim to it than another.

76

So what is your argument then? Are you seriously going to suggest that what you just said makes what Paul is doing justified, or ethical?

I say that just because someone came to justly own something in an illegitimate system, it doesn’t mean you have the right to outrightly go and take it from them just because that same system says you can.

I think something along the lines of “two wrongs don’t make a right” is in order here.

Really if you want to make that argument you might as well say that all your money isn’t really yours because of the way it’s created. I’ll link your dollars to other people and use the legal system to have all the dollars you own expropriated from you, because “no person can have a better claim to them than any other.”

77

Clearly you haven’t read my posts in this thread, because you are not accurately portraying what I’ve said. I will restate an earlier analogy:

Right now, the government owns nearly all the roads in America. We all pay taxes, and those of us who drive more pay more taxes towards the roads. Who has the right to actually use these roads? Car drivers? Bicyclists? Runners? Horse and buggy? Protests? Parades? The rules change for various roads. This would be an easy answer in a society where the roads are private - let the owners decide. But it’s not private, so the decisions are left to government. If you want to protest or have a parade, you need to go through government, which means that the government will ban anyone else from using the road while you are using it for your event.

The situation with domain names is no different. We are not in a system where domain names are privately owned. Well, in a sense they are in that ICANN is in charge. Since ICANN owns them, ICANN gets to make the rules. If it were the government that owned them, the government would get to make the rules. As libertarians, clearly we don’t think that the government should own them or that ICANN’s claims are legitimate.

If Ron Paul wanted to organize a parade on Main Street, he would need to go through government. Maybe we would prefer that the store owners are the ones who own the road in front of their stores, maybe it wouldn’t be the case. Who knows? What we know is that the government does own the road, and if you want to use it for something other than driving, you need to go through them. With your position, you would be accusing Ron Paul of using the government to aggress against the people who own buildings on the road. It is not clear that they would be the legitimate owners, and it is perfectly reasonable and not contrary to libertarianism for Ron Paul to request the use of roads from the government for a parade.

How DNS Works and Fixing DNS - how to break up ICANN by Brad Templeton. From the first link:

From this, it sounds like you are paying ICANN to put your domain name on a list so that when others search for your domain name, they get routed to your site. But they don’t have to use ICANN’s list. It’s convenient to use ICANN’s list because everyone else does, just like it’s convenient to use the US dollar because everyone else does (hahaha, because the US government would totally accept taxes paid in goods, but I digress). So no one owns “ronpaul.com”. They register with ICANN so that “ronpaul.com” routes to the servers they want. Ron Paul is appealing to the rules that the ICANN list routes to him instead of the other people. He is not violating someone’s “homesteaded” domain name. Absurd.

78

No, I’m not going to suggest that. Wenzel and Rockwell suggest that and I critique them for it. I suggest it may be the kind of a lifeboat scenario for which there isn’t a real answer to it.

If I am feezing in water along with another guy who is the son of an MP, and then a government aircraft flies overhead and drops a tiny taxpayer-funded raft for the other guy to use to save himself, then I don’t give a crap, if the government employees who dropped the raft intended it for the son of the MP and not me. I am inclined to wrestle it away from the other guy, even if he was able to swam to it before me, by the virtue of the plane dropping it nearer to him than me. I won’t say my doing so is justified, but it certainly isn’t unjustified either. F him. I don’t see any reason he is more entitled to live than I am, by the virtue of the government having his back and not mine.

Well we would have to define what exactly it is the RPCP own. For example what if the state in return for a fee granted people the privilege of others not being able to come within 15 feet of them in public spaces? Would you say that was a justly acquired privilege in an illegitimate system? You wouldn’t.

What RPCP have now is two-fold. One is the ability to map their site to ronpaul.com which they should have, and the monopoly on being the only ones to be able to do so, which they shouldn’t have. RP on the other hand doesn’t have the ability to map his site to ronpaul.com, which he should have, but also doesn’t have the ability to preclude all people other than himself from doing so, which he should not have. Either way somebody is going to get screwed in equal proportion. So who shall it be? Why is it more right RP gets shafted rather than RPCP, or indeed the other way around?

I agree nobody is in the right, question is is anybody wrong?

No, I think you’re overstating your case here. Dollars aren’t a privilege. I can’t force people to give me something for them, if they don’t want to sell.

79

That’s a bad analogy, because it is clear to me the store owners do own the road in front of the store right now. (I guess it’s a commercial street?) Maybe in ancapistan they would eventually come to sell it off and it would be the case this situation of store owners actually owning the road would be extremely rare, however, as is the case now, in this very moment, they are the rightful owners. If RP got a permit to hold a parade the store keepers didn’t want, and held it, he would be guilty of trespass.

Your federally-funded highway out on the sticks is a much better example, because there rightful ownership actually is murky in the present (and may only be resolved once government is gotten out of the way).

80

Why do the store owners own the road? Not only do we all pay taxes to the roads, but store owners change a lot. I’d say that current store owners have a better claim than the government does, but I don’t see why they necessarily have the best claim out of everyone. They didn’t build the road, and it’s quite possible that what they paid in taxes didn’t fully cover the financing.