Hello Kate,

>ADNA organised the meetings.  You had every opportunity
>to call together *everyone* who needed to be involved,
>and to provide them with the information they needed
>to make informed decisions.

Hey, mea culpa.  I have already said that after the
meeting, I was strongly of the opinion that the process
was not successful for a number of reasons.

Its so easy to be clever in hindsight even I can do it,
but with hindsight I feel very strongly that any forum
where the majority of participants don't have very
good understanding of the range of DNS issues and whats
possible and whats not possible, should be handled
differently.

With hindsight, a pre-issues paper stating the situation,
what was and what was not possible with the DNS, would
have been valuable.  A discussion of all the options,
not just 3, would have been valuable.  A discussion of
the problems with side effects would have been valuable.

That didn't occur.  In my opinion, we didn't get it
right, okay?

It happened to occur with a forum discussing trademark
issues, but it could have ocurred with a public forum
on something else related to the DNS.

BTW, calling "together *everyone* who needed to be
involved" is never possible - you never get everyone
who should be involved together (all 18 million
Australians in the one room?).  You get always get
a subset, and usually the subset is skewed towards
those with the biggest vested interests.

But it could have been done better.

>How did you know they were a "room full of trademark lawyers" -- were
>they wearing wigs?  Robes?  You didn't know, you assumed.

You are completely correct. My assumption was based on their
own identification of themselves when making points, and my
discussions with them during the breaks.  But its not an
incontovertible fact.

>If you thought that the process had failed, that the wrong people had
>attended, that those who attended were ignorant, then you had NO right
>to charge ahead with *any* decisions in this arena.

We are in complete agreement here Kate.  ADNA made no changes
whatsoever in any area relating to the DNS and trademarks.

There are somewhere around 900,000 businesess in Australia.
95% of them are small business.  That is the basic 'constituency'
of .com.au.  They were not by any stretch of the imagination
represented at those meetings.

The position I put at the ADNA board meeting when I voted against
any changes was that the process was not successful, that the
meeting attendees were a specific interest group, and therefore
not representative - of the .com.au 'constituency'.

BTW, I'm happy to receive any suggestions on how we establish
the views of 900,000 small business on the effect of a small
number of big businesses registering a vast number of domain
names and therefore substantially reducing the chance of the
small businesses getting their name of choice.

Please tell me.

>This is what is wrong with ADNA!  You haven't the faintest concept that
>what you did was wrong.

No, what we did was right.  We rejected the view of a minority in
favour of the general good.

>Remember all the stuff in the M&A that I was concerned about regarding
>committees, and how the board could just ignore them anyway?

This leads us on to what may be the start of a possibly complex,
but I think valuable, discussion of just what is meant by
terms like 'Public Trust'.  Setting up specific committees
that focus and recommend on an issue does not mean that those
groups recommendation's are automatically implemented - that
is in DIRECT conflict with the notion of 'Public Good'.

A specific committee will give the view of a particular sub-set
of the community - that is its job.  Such committees are best
placed to develop recommendations that their sub-set of the
community prefers.

But any particular sub-set of the community cannot possibly
make an unbiased decision on whether its recommendations are
really in the total public interest.

There has to be a higher level group which receives input
from the community sub-set and then it has to make a decision
on whether the recommendation of the sub-set is in the
total public interest.  That is the function of the higher
level group.

The higher level group makes judgemental decisions - these
decisions are never black and white, there's never an
absolute right or wrong - on whether advantages to a
sub-set are outweighed by disadvantages to the total
community.

If the higher level automatically approves every
recommendation of a sub-set, then the 'public trust'
function cannot possibly be fulfilled.

Re-structure ADNA how you will - lets assume it does
get done to the stage where everyone is happy.  I
assure you the situation will occur where a recommendation
of one sub-set is not accepted because the view of the
higher level will be that the proposal was not in
the interest of the larger community.  That is what
making decisions in the 'public trust' is all about.

Regards, Mark