Why Ron Paul has a claim on his name on the Internet

Plaque on the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These guys wanting a quarter million means that the web site means a lot of money for anybody who owns it, BUT I DO think they know that they can never get the use of it, nor get the liberty-message mileage, AND their demand for a quarter million speaks volumes to the FACT that they are VERY MUCH into getting something just for being the first to take advantage of a GOVERNMENT-CREATED monopoly on DNS names and the DNS system for the entire world.

ICANN independent you say, not government? No more than the Federal Reserve, right?

The assumption that somehow Ron Paul is using government force to rob something from somebody that they “homesteaded”. NOT SO!

The DNS system and the government-protected monopoly mandate ICANN has to control the names, is a government “virtual” reality.

That’s why I think eventually Stephen Kinsella may even change his mind about this issue, because I agree with his view that a government-created “virtual” property is a speech-suppressing fiction and distortion on the free market. It’s not a telecommunications monopoly like AT&T was before their breakup, BUT it is a “virtual” monopoly.

He said in one interview that if not for trademark law, Ron Paul would have no basis for a claim.

My answer to that is that without a government protection for the ICANN monopoly, and its de facto control over the names by virtue of an Internet that grew as a government creation instead of “organically” like it was before ARPA “took them over” –whether by intention or by accident. It is also a government so bloated out of proportion to the “free” economy, such as it was, that the thing was warped from the beginning by government presence, because by then it was the biggest thing going in the economy.

When you go to visit somebody in the physical world, you look for what the address is. There is no easy such system for the Internet, and when you “lease” the “rights” to the name before somebody else from this government-created committee, you also implicitly are forced to agree that the same ones who granted this monopoly on the name in the DNS servers across the country, have the right to abide by their own rules, or at least make judgments based on those rules, to give it to somebody else.

In other words, all Internet named addresses have to go to the government-created name clearinghouse before you could get to your address, and they tell your computer where to go.

I’ve seen the mentions of other famous people who could not get sites with their names, BUT the examples I’ve seen are NOT examples that equate AT ALL. billclintonsucks.com is NOT billclinton.com.

Truth is, for awhile there were maverick companies making a bit of money by setting up other primary domains. One of them was dot-info, before the ICANN “approved” it. At the time, anybody with a DNS server on the Internet who wanted to was able to direct traffic that ended in that suffix to that DNS server, or download its name-to-address tables.

So get with it people. I once went to ronpaul-dot-com expecting it to be the good doctor’s own web site, and as soon as I realized it wasn’t I lost interest in it. That’s just me but it is worth something.

But the arguments against Ron Paul getting his name back from the government monopoly on virtual names, well, that’s just fair.

And these guys have apparently done okay by the message, while building a business. But when they say they’re barely “breaking even”, get skeptical, or, if they are barely “breaking even”, then why do they think the name is worth a quarter-million?

I recommend also reading Lew Rockwell’s article on this “controversy”, as he also adds a few facts that were ignored when the story broke. Like for example, the name-grabbers and present “owners” saying Ron Paul was going to the United Nations for this. Somebody picked up on this to go to the utterly ridiculous headlines. It’s a fictitious “ownership” because ICANN ultimately controls the naming anyway, and you have to keep handing them the recognition of the ownership fee annually or it “lapses” to someone else.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/132275.html

So there you go, you think about that.

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Ron Paul and ronpaul.com: The argument I haven’t seen out there

Ron Paul at the 2007 National Right to Life Convention, held at Crown Center Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, MO; June 15, 2007, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

 

 

 

Good insight, Andrew. If ICANN is set up to enforce a government monopoly controlling domain names, which it is like Kinsella says, then the way Kinsella seems to be coming down on this is self-contradictory, as is the position of the ronpaul.com supporters.

 

I heard Kinsella on the Adam Koresh youtube channel interview about this. After explaining how it is a government-mandated monopoly system under the cover of a quasi-private quasi-official organization like the Fed, and how there are some 30 government officials on the Board of it, he then goes on to refer to Ron Paul‘s actions in this matter as a taking, as if it stood in a vacuum outside of a government-enforced monopoly over domain assignments!

The Internet domain name claim system is LIKE FAKE FIAT FED CURRENCY. Use this or use nothing! If the government had stayed out of it, if there were no trademark law, and no ICANN rule-making body, then an interconnecting network of networks could have grown organically, Ron Paul would own his name and there would grow from the free market a way to see what he says without the ambiguities of who claims a monopoly right on the name first. That’s my opinion for a hypothetical obviously.

But like I have said elsewhere, get another perspective. As one who lost by two days of thinking about grabbing the URL for http://www.miami.com (arggh), just imagine the ronpaul.com guys when they went looking for it. They could not BELIEVE their outrageous good luck in finding out that they got there before Ron Paul himself. Grab it quick, Jack, before Ron Paul figures it out!

Now they whine and complain that they want compensation for being first grabber of a trademark-law-guaranteed monopoly.

Either way this goes, I lean to the same Kinsella view of copyright, patent, and trademark laws. But it is blatantly self-contradictory to say you think trademark law is theft, and then support the monopoly control over it that he says he figures will go to the current “owners” of the name. He seems to agree that the claim is an attempt to seize private property, but he did hesitate a bit when he was asked that, directly by Koresh. But it is property with conditions. Under any “natural law” that might be analogous to trademark law considered here, Ron Paul has a higher claim on the political implications of his name than anybody. They rode Ron Paul’s name and his fame to their own claim.

 

Ron Paul a hypothetical plumber in Minnesota, could make a credible claim to the name factor that is being used to criticize the action, but that’s irrelevant here because the present “owners” of the URL do not carry that name except as a government-created fiction.

And Ron Paul is NOT “filing suit”, he is filing a claim. This is an administrative body but it is an arbitration process besides that.

ARE WE DISAPPOINTED WITH RON PAUL JUST BECAUSE HE USES FEDERAL RESERVE NOTES WHEN HE BUYS GAS??!! Or because he had to use the two-party duopoly to make his point and leave his legacy? You think his usurping the Establishment Republicans’ “rightful” ownership of the party deserves any more than a spitting glance?

 

Do YOU pay for your gas with fake counterfeit money?

 

I think this whole thing has been blown out of proportion by the savvy loud and fast blast of propaganda that ronpaul.com “owners” executed masterfully and immediately.

 

They claim that they offered it free to Ron Paul without compensation, but this is a moot claim, since they obviously did not mean it. They wanted something in return, or otherwise they would just let him have it. Without monetary compensation, maybe, but they wanted something that, in my opinion, when we know exactly what it supposedly was, was something that was of convertible value. I suspect.

 

Again, we do not fault Ron Paul for using what he calls counterfeit money to negotiate for the fruits of his labor at the supermarket. Nor do we fault ourselves. It is simply does not cut so clearly in the present monopoly franchisee’s favor. We shall see how it falls, but the biggest problem is that this infighting over this issue is distracting attention from the bigger issues of the economic and social disaster fast coming, and all the issues of Ron Paul’s message.

 

 

 

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