So what if the store owners change a lot? They buy the road with the store from the previous owners. And if you paid taxes to build the store keepers road, he paid taxes to build the road in front of your own residence that is your property. There is plenty of urban road for everyone, and it evens itself out in the end.
From American Road & Transportation Builders Association:
I don’t think it’s clear that store owners have paid possibly tens or hundreds of thousands in dollars in taxes dedicated to roads when they buy the store. I think what you are proposing is more just than what we have currently, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the right answer in all cases.
Nope nope nope. You had a decent analogy until this part. And it’s the only one that matters, because of course this is where you apply your “roads” to this actual situation.
You’re leaving out the fact that someone else is already conducting a parade down Main Street. And they did go through government. They did not sneak around and fraudulently change some schedule of events so that they could appear as reserving the street when someone else already had it. They got it as legitimately as possible in the illegitimate setup.
You’re arguing that you planned a parade, and even after you went through the proper channels, got your request approved, prepped all the floats, set up all the vender carts and various ancillary attributes, sent out all the flyers, set up all the billboards, paid for all the marketing, and made sure everyone knew your parade was going to be at this location…that I should be able to come in and have the government revoke your standing, and shut down your parade, so that I can take it over.
…And that I would be just fine in doing so, because, well, you have no better claim to the road than I do, and the government has the final say so, since they, kind of de facto own the road through fiat (and force/coercion). So as long as I can convince them that I should get the road, you can fuck off.
And how am I going to convince them that I have a better claim to the road (even though I admit that my claim is no better than anyone else’s)? By asserting that I have a common law ownership of the air in the area, because people around Main Street know how I smell. I plan to make the case that, because people know how I smell, and the air around Main Street kind of smells like me, that actually means that I have a greater claim to be conducting my parade on the street than you.
Yeah. There’s absolutely nothing unlibertarian about any of that. It’s all right up there with asserting a claim to a right to live.
And it’s actually comical how you don’t even realize how you’re trying to argue two sides of this. You to recognize the reality that “they don’t have to use ICANN’s list”, and you attempt to use this to make the foundation of your argument in favor of Ron Paul doing what he’s doing (i.e. make it so that it’s not unlibertarian),"…but in the same post you basically admit the domain is essentially a rivalrous good, because “almost everybody uses the same list of root servers.” And you back this up with your street analogy.
Again, ICANN is an organization basically created through government, supported by government, largely (essentially) run by government, and basically backed by government…which holds the position it does only because of government…and because of all this, for all intents and purposes, ICANN is government.
What your argument basically boils down to is:
"Hey, if people don’t like the way the government is handling the roads (and deciding who gets to use them), they could always just fly. So there’s basically nothing wrong with John Q. Moneybags-Politicalconnections petitioning the government to forcibly remove that old lady from her house so that he can build his stadium. (With taxpayer subsidies of course.)
I mean, she has no greater claim to the land than he does. Maybe we would prefer that the person who lives on the land is the one who owns it, maybe it wouldn’t be the case. Who knows? What we know is that the government does own the land, and if you want to use it for something, you need to go through them. So as long as Moneybags-Politicalconnections goes through the proper city councils and zoning channels, it’s all good. Nothing unlibertarian about that. Dos are da rulez."
Speaking of absurd…
lol @ your reading comprehension
I’m assuming the buildings were there long before pavement, as is the case everywhere I look where a live. It’s not the fault of the store owners the municipality poured asphalt onto their land.
So actually scratch the bit where I talk about taxes myself, in total.
The whole thing is a mess.
Stellar argument.
Truly spoken like someone who has no rebuttal.
There’s no need to rebut. Anyone who cares about the discussion can read for themselves.
But what if we say that someone else is not just conducting a parade down Main Street, instead they bought a licence to be the only ones able to conduct a parade down Main Street forever for as long as they cough up 20 dollars per annum? Wouldn’t that cast a different light on the situation, while making the analogy stil more apt?
PS, this is ridicilous, all this Main Street talk, it’s like you want to make go listen to some Bob Seger.
Oh well then by all means would you be so kind enough as to explain what it is I got wrong?
Sure why not. You said yourself it’s a shitty analogy. I didn’t come up with it. gotlucky did. I was simply using his shitty analogy as best I could to give a more realistic description of what’s going on here.
So go ahead and visually replace the appropriate words in my post to “parade license”. Now what. That does nothing to change my point as far as I can see. It certainly does nothing to argue that Paul should be able to use the government to revoke the license and have such an act be considered libertarian. (Or at least not unlibertarian, which is basically what this whole thing is about.)
But if somebody precludes me from ever marching down a street in a parade because they made a deal with a government for the latter to have their back I can be righftully pissed. I won’t consider their privilege to bar me from ever marching is their ‘justly acquired property in an illegitimate system’. Do you?
I never said anything about “justly acquired property.” You’re putting words in my mouth. The closest thing I said to that was “They got it as legitimately as possible in the illegitimate setup.”
And it doesn’t bar you from ever marching. That’s more bullshit. It bars you from marching on that street only, and even then, only if I don’t want you to. It is essentially as if I own the street. You are free to negotiate with me on when or how you may use the street, and you are free to buy the street from me. Nothing “bars” you from marching down that street permanently, let alone marching at all.
And you can quite easily “own” your own street that you are free to march on all you want.
Sure, if you want to get to the very root of it, I might agree with you,
“One has 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.”
But bringing it back to the land analogy, all of this land in the United States isn’t exactly “justly aquired”. Me buying a piece of property from the government or from some descendent of some European settler who “homesteaded” the land after it’s original inhabitants were murdered doesn’t exactly give me full “just” rights to it. But where do you draw the line, and how far back does it have to go? Again, it’s still the eminent domain argument. You don’t have a “legitimate” claim to the land, so as long as I can convince the de facto “owner” that I should get it instead of you, you can fuck off?
Surely you don’t want to go down that road. (Parden the pun.)
The whole situation really boils down to the fact that a single (essentially centralized) master root server exists, whereas in a free society, it might not. That is the basis for your claim that a domain registrant “ha[s] the ability to preclude all people other than himself from [mapping his site to a specific domain], which he should not have.”
But the fact of the matter is, that situation could exist in a free society…it could feasibly come about that a single master root server was the most practical (perhaps like a universal money is most practical). And in that case, “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 would ever have a quasi-IP-based domain name dispute policy”.
So either way, you have no leg to stand on in defense of Ron Paul here.
You’ve got a system of de facto scarcity of domains, which it is debatable whether such a scarcity would exist in a free market. If it wouldn’t exist in a free market, then you essentially come to an eminent domain argument…where you have to draw a line of assertion as to when “legitimate” ownership started. In that case, if you want to side with Ron Paul, then you have to defend Mr. Moneybags-Politicalconnections and his takeover of Grandma Jones’ cottage to build his stadium, because in both situations, you’re basically resting on the “nobody has a better claim than anybody else, so it’s basically whoever can convince the government to give it to him” argument.
On the other hand, if such a scarcity of domains would exist in a free market, then you come to a legitimate dispute situation…which would have to be resolved, but which would have no quorum for reputation rights, or any sort of IP rights (no trademark, no copyright, no right of publicity, etc.)…meaning the grounds on which Ron Paul is making his claim would have no standing. They are illegitimate.
Let’s also not forget RP had the domain and let his registration expire. One could argue he had his shot in this monopoly system and gave it up. Even if you want to argue “this is the system”, that still offers no reason he should be able to take back a position he forfeited.
And once again, the bottom line is:
Is it fair to say that Ron Paul is using government to steal from his supporters?
“Yes.”
Domain names are like phone numbers. You don’t own your phone number. The only property that is owned are the phones and the infrastructure that connects everything. You contract with a phone company to connect you to the network and provide you with phone service. Let’s say you contract with Verizon and they give you a number 1-800-555-1234. You don’t own that number. Verizon doesn’t own that number. It’s just a number that everyone uses in order to process phone calls so that they go to you when someone dials 1-800-555-1234. It wouldn’t do you much good if Verizon was a company that didn’t recognize the numbers that were given out by other companies. If AT&T, Sprint, etc., all used 1-800-555-1234 to refer to another phone, then that doesn’t do you much good.
ICANN is a phonebook. It doesn’t own your computer or the infrastructure that connects computers and servers throughout the world. You contact a registrar and they register a domain name for you with ICANN. No one else can register that domain name with ICANN. This doesn’t make your domain name your property any more than it makes your phone number your property. When you type “www.google.com” into your browser, your computer connects to your ISP’s DNS servers to lookup what computer to connect you to. Verizon doesn’t have to connect you to Google’s servers. It could connect you to “www.verizon.net” if it wanted. But that doesn’t do you much good. Verizon gets its DNS list from ICANN, so when you lookup “www.google.com” with your browser, you get Google’s website.
These guys registered “www.ronpaul.com” with ICANN. That does not make it their property. All it does is mean that whoever uses the ICANN list to translate “www.ronpaul.com” into an IP gets the particular website associated with the ICANN list. Ron Paul is contesting this with the rules of ICANN. It would be as if Ron Paul used the rules of Verizon to transfer 1-800-555-1234 from you to him. You don’t own that number. You don’t have to use Verizon.
Now I’m going to repost Clayton’s repost of Lew Rockwell’s points:
None of that does anything to really refute what I said. (But it does kind of illustrate how shitty your analogy was.)
And thanks for reposting Rockwell. I just love reading how I should agree with what Ron Paul is doing in 2013 because a man who died seventeen years ago “loved and admired” him.
lol @ your reading comprehension.
I’m through talking about this with you. You can learn to read and process what’s been said, or you can continue being ignorant. Anyone who cares about the topic can read for themselves.
I knew you’d resort to some non-response. I just didn’t realize it would be the exact same one.
If you actually had an actual defense to your support of Ron Paul, you’d address the explication made instead of continuing to simply give a DNS system overview as if anyone here didn’t understand it.
It seems to me it’s either the eminent domain situation, or the IP situation. Go ahead and take your pick. Which statist institution would you like to defend?
My biggest problem with this is that if ICANN was a private institution in a free market then I wouldn’t consider this theft. Just a really daft contract that the holder of the domain name had agreed to. I mean, basically anyone who did business would them would be in a permanent bind, since they could never be sure whether someone else could put in a better claim than them.
You’re basically signing a contract in regards to a traffic sign company to put up a sign that points to your shop with a specific sentence on the sign, and in the contract they specify that if someone else asks them to point the sign in another direction then there’s a chance they will.
Precisely. In that case, it couldn’t possibly be considered theft. But it doesn’t immediately follow that since it’s not “purely private”, that therefore this is theft. What people - commoners, media pundits, security specialists, politicians, etc. etc. - frequently do, is they unjustifiably extend the metaphors by which we discuss Internet phenomena. In the process, they forget that they are just metaphors.
There actually isn’t that much about the Internet which is virtual and “property-like”. And what little there is, is the creation of the ICANN system and the giant telecoms who are trying to create a massive “backbone” through which the vast majority of traffic flows… so they can control it. Mostly, the Internet is just a digital packet relay and switching system. Monkey-see, monkey say. Each router or “hop” receives a packet and forwards it to the next “hop”, unaltered. The only processing required is that the router will look up the packet’s destination IP in its routing table to choose which of the destination routers it has a connection with to forward the packet to. As far as the “infrastructure” goes, that’s basically all there is to the Internet. What makes it complicated is that there are zillions of routers owned by many entities, most of them private.
So, the routers are privately owned. The contents of the routing table is ultimately the decision of each router’s owner. The domain-name system is just a network of online servers dedicated to translating URLs (human readable) to IPs (machine readable). DNS does not even control the routing of packets, which is what makes things like OpenDNS possible. The DNS servers, in turn, are privately owned - though the vast majority are ICANN-compliant and no DNS that is not ICANN-compliant will ever be consulted by your computer unless you specifically configure it to do so. Nonetheless, to comply or not to comply is the decision of the DNS server’s owner.
Kinsella once used the phrase “contract with the Internet” in the above video. Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue. If not, he gravely misunderstands the nature of the Internet. You cannot have a “contract with the Internet”… there’s no actual party “the Internet”, so it would be a contract with nothing and no one. This is an essential point because - to the extent that the Internet is free of government interference - its norms are a lot like language norms. They are binding but not because there is anyone in particular who enforces them. It’s just that no one will play with you unless you follow the rules. And since no one gets to set the rules, the rules are just whatever everyone happens to be doing.
Such emergent order is actually more stable than its hierarchical counterpart. ICANN/IANA is an attempt to apply hierarchical control through the DNS system and IP-mapping. It’s like having a dictionary written by a government-created private entity. Who made them God that they can dictate to us what words we can and cannot use? After all, the routing tables and DNS servers (and local computers which may have cached copies) are the private property of their respective owners. But what we see happening is that in the vast majority of the Internet - those portions over which the Establishment has so far managed to keep little control - the more natural emergent order expresses itself and flourishes, essentially conflict free.
Clayton -
Thank you for setting the record straight. It was not my intention to be misleading. I needed to put it into my sentence and felt that was actually an equivalent to what you said. Apparently not…