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Lew Rockwell: Ron Paul Not Using the State or UN to Control RonPaul.Com 232

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-is-is dept.
New submitter sbulut77 writes with a follow up to accusations Ron Paul is using the UN to gain control of ronpaul.com. "Lew Rockwell explains the RonPaul.com issue. There is so much misinformation on this topic, his blog is very welcome. His blog entry is pretty short and well-written please read the blog post directly." From the article: "Ron is not calling on the UN. ICANN has four approved arbitration organizations. 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. The UN itself is not involved, though note — whatever else is wrong with it — the UN is not a State."
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Lew Rockwell: Ron Paul Not Using the State or UN to Control RonPaul.Com More

Lew Rockwell: Ron Paul Not Using the State or UN to Control RonPaul.Com

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  • So he is not using the UN, just the UN (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @02:55PM (#42886321)

    Just admit to being a hypocrite instead of playing semantic games.

    • Re:So he is not using the UN, just the UN (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jythie ( 914043 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @03:00PM (#42886391)
      Sadly it is pretty much the only way to keep the mythology alive... gotta take advantage of all those systems while still putting on a facade of being against them. So it is not that he is using a system that he claims to be against just because it suits him when negotiations failed to produce the deal he wanted... no, it has to be rephrased to sound like he has no choice...

      This is little more then 'I believe in the free market, unless regulation gives me a better deal, then I am not actually using regulation because.. look a squirrel!'
      • I think it is not UN directly, it is WIPO, the international patent&trademark body. They are the common arbiter for domain disputes. Here is an 'entertainment' filtered search result [wipo.int] of their past decisions including "madonna.com", "sting.com", "jethrotull.com", "jimihendrix.com", "scorpions.com" and many many others. Ron Paul has a pretty good chance to win the dispute there.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      Just admit to being a hypocrite instead of playing semantic games.

      why is it a troll? if the fucking guy has to blame this kind of technical wordplay games he could just go and fuck himself.

      it's like saying that the lapd isn't part of the state or that cia isn't part of the state and therefore the state isn't involved in waterboarding...

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by rs79 ( 71822 )

      Bingo. The procedure he's using comes from WIPO at the behest of the Intellectual Property lobby; it's the method that won out over the free-market alternative. My name is one one of those documents somewhere; I was there.

      WIPO is a UN chartered organization.

      WIPO is also responsible for the free-market killing nightmare that is ICANN. This began in 1997 when Robert Shaw from the ITU met Albert Tramposch from WIPO and Don Heath from ISOC. Each of them was seeking greater relevance to the net for their organiz

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rs79 ( 71822 )

        Note that the procedure he's using is supposed to be a streamlined cheaper version of going to court. Paul could have done that instead. Rather, he chose the new world order method because it saved him 10X what he paid to WIPO.

        Thus proving in a truly free market, the NWO is just another vendor and that libertarians know a bargain when they see one.

  • I did not want to kill all those people, i have to play the hand I was dealt. It is not like I have the ability to just walk away from the table and not interact with agencies I don't agree with. I don't want to gamble, I have to. The government makes me.

    Ron Paul is a free individual. He has a choice. No one forces us to do anything. For example, no one has to pay taxes, one just has to have the willingness to live in a way that no taxes or owed, or are willing to do what it takes to avoid it. All o

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tnk1 ( 899206 )

      Thanks for the straw man argument.

      This isn't about killing people, it's about using a bureaucratic process.

      Contrary to what you believe, there are situations were it is considered perfectly reasonable to use existing processes and work inside the law and current confines, which is something that by remaining a more or less loyal Republican, Ron Paul has always seemed to do.

      The ability to accept compromise is directly related to what is at stake. If the result of the compromise is death of parties you would

      • But he's using a bureaucratic process he rallies against, while ignoring equally valid/legitimate options within the confines of the processes that he often argues for.

        The GP may overstate the seriousness of the issue, but otherwise, he's pretty spot on.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tnk1 ( 899206 )

          Let me be clear here, while I don't think Ron Paul is actually a crackpot, I disagree with him on a lot of things, including the UN.

          Still, Ron Paul may well believe that he has a right to his name as expressed as a domain. He probably believes that under his system, he would have an acceptable means of addressing his complaint.

          However, since he does not have his system, the UN fills the position that he needs to assert his rights. It's not that he is accepting the UN, he just can't avoid it.

  • Is there any kind of actual story here or just predictable excuses and hair splits about the UN not being involved but actually involved and the UN isn't technically a state anyway, so it's okay?

  • This Is Beyond Inane & Changes Nothing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@noSpAM.gmail.com> on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @03:04PM (#42886441) Journal
    Okay so I read this rebuttal and I stand by my earlier position [slashdot.org].

    From my understanding, the group made a good faith offering of ronpaul.org to Ron Paul for free but wanted $250,000 for the commercial ronpaul.com in order to recoup the work and effort they put in. On top of that, I see nothing malicious, untruthful, slanderous or libelous on ronpaul.com -- quite the opposite! So this is how capitalism works, I have something you want and I have come to own it by legal means so it doesn't matter if it has your name on it or not. I'm sure they could drum up another person out there named Ron Paul if you want to play that game. Now, with all that said, the only option in a libertarian world is to either pay that sum, get a different URL or tell your followers to stop going to ronpaul.com. Turning to any -- and I mean ANY -- higher power to subvert that desired price is, by definition, appealing to a governing body to impose some form of regulation. And the only reason is to subvert the sale and tendering of cash from your hands to the party who has due ownership and control. Ron Paul says "Property rights are the foundation of all rights in a free society." And this is a directly contradictory action to that maxim whether he is a private citizen or not.

    Ron is not using the State to acquire RonPaul.com. He could have brought a lawsuit in US government courts, but he did not.

    Just because you use another arm or governing body instead of the official United States government does not mean you aren't using the State.

    He is seeking to have ICANN enforce its own rules against cybersquatting, including the rule against registering a famous person’s name and making money off it.

    Wait wait wait. I'm confused. You see, you're using the R word and your calling it a "rule" but I think the word that Ron Paul and most libertarians like to use is "regulation" and then they spit because it leaves a dirty taste in their mouth. What is the difference between rules against cybersquatting and government regulation? What is the difference between the New York Times using Ron Paul's name to sell newspapers and this site printing facts about him to make money? This isn't about what is right and wrong, this about the convenience of owning a domain. Ron Paul even has a different official domain, is this site parading around purporting to be the official Ron Paul domain? No? Then what exactly are your allegations?

    Anyone registering a URL agrees to keep all the rules, just as he must pay a recurring fee. A URL is not private property in the normal sense. It is a license, and ICANN is a private, non-profit organization.

    Wrong, ICANN was created to assume their responsibilities under a United States Department of Commerce contract. Haven't you been following the news where the rest of the world wants the US to give up control of ICANN? They act on the US Government's behalf. And in a libertarian world there would be no rules. Money and the free market would set the rules. In a free market you would have a whole bunch of different DNS registrars and lookup services. You could pick whichever one you liked the best. They would be for sale as entities. Big corporations could just pay them to change their DNS records to point resolution of weaker companies to their websites. When you typed in a URL it could go wherever the money tells it to go and if you don't like that, you might change to OpenDNS or someone else -- if they exist. But everyone has a price in a libertarian world. Rules are regulations and regulations are bad in a libertarian world. End of story. Rules ruin the free market. Regulations ruin capitalism and they are a hallmark of socialism.

    Ron is not calling on the UN. ICANN has four approved arbitration organizations. Because the RP.com guys registered Ron's name in Au

    • Not enough Libertopian novels for you! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sirwired ( 27582 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @03:29PM (#42886773)

      If you read the SF novels detailing life in Libertopia, you'll find that, as if by magic, citizens voluntarily donate enough of their income to feed, clothe, and house those that are poor through no fault of their own. They purchase, build, and staff a full parks system out of the goodness of their hearts.

      They are willing to lay their lives down, free of charge (and provide weapons and ammo, no less!) for their country/planet/space station. Everybody is cool with the idea that murder is a civil matter to be dealt with by heirs, who will gladly pay for the investigation. (And, by unspoken extension, if you don't have any heirs that like you, your life isn't worth $hit.) As long as you can pay the economic damages for your doings, well, you can pretty much do whatever you want.

      • If you read the SF novels detailing life in Libertopia, you'll find that, as if by magic, citizens voluntarily donate enough of their income to feed, clothe, and house those that are poor through no fault of their own. They purchase, build, and staff a full parks system out of the goodness of their hearts.

        This is how things used to be done.

        The fact that it probably won't work today is not because people don't care or don't have a heart. It is because the government has, in very large part, assumed the task of collecting money involuntarily, and people quite naturally think "I'm already paying for the government to do this, why should I pay again?"

        You could cancel all government welfare (which includes parks and rec, IMHO) tomorrow, but it would take a long time before people realized that the government

        • This is how things used to be done.

          This is how many countries used to do it, before the people realized that all of their poor people were in thrall to the church, labor union or political movement that was feeding them instead. In Germany, the national health insurance system was developed specifically with the goal of breaking the Social Democratic party, Spain and Italy adopted social insurance systems as anticlerical reforms, among other reasons.

          Dumb joke: you know who else fed the poor and gave them

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

          >>If you read the SF novels detailing life in Libertopia, you'll find that, as if by magic, citizens voluntarily donate enough of their income to feed, clothe, and house those that are poor through no fault of their own. They purchase, build, and staff a full parks system out of the goodness of their hearts.

          >This is how things used to be done.

          When? Please come up with a concrete time boxed example of a country doing this. I'm pretty sure that I could look at the details and come up with a more ac

        • So, are you telling me that prior to modern anti-poverty programs like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, welfare, etc. nobody starved to death or died for lack of access to medical care? And that vast tracts of parkland were cheerfully secured, maintained, and opened to the public?

          If that's your position, you need to go back and read your history books some more.

          I'm not saying any of those programs are perfect or not subject to abuse. But it most certainly is NOT correct to say that starvation and home

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by foofish ( 10132 )

        If you read the SF novels detailing life in Libertopia, you'll find that...

        And if you read the science fiction novels depicting life on the planet Arrakis, you'll find that people can rapidly travel through space and see the future by doing drugs. There are also enormous worms that live in the desert and produce said drugs. Some people have also developed an economy based on water. There is a quasi religious order who has an intricate breeding program and can control all of their bodily functions. Sci fi is so crazy, right?

        (PS, I am unfamiliar with "Libertopia", but it sounds like

    • See, your problem is you don't understand libertarianism. Libertarianism requires a minimal government, a government that is forbidden from working on behalf of any social, democratic, or moral good, while demanding the same government manifest near-godlike powers in the defense of property from incursion. And the more peculiar and abstract the property is, like the intellectual property of trademarks, the more godlike and coercive the state becomes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dumky2 ( 2610695 )

      I'm confused. You see, you're using the R word and your calling it a "rule" but I think the word that Ron Paul and most libertarians like to use is "regulation"

      If you assume that both private rules and government regulations are voluntary, then I understand your confusion. The central concern of libertarians is to restrict civil society to voluntary behaviors based on property rights.
      But government is not a voluntary association. Therefore government rules are illegitimate. They are based on coercion (of a king, or a majority, or an influential minority, all of which are bad).
      Private organizations are voluntary and therefore their rules are legitimate. For exa

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lennier ( 44736 )

        But government is not a voluntary association.

        It's not? You get to vote on laws, which is a lot more input than a corporation will give you on its contract, and if you don't like the whole package, you can always pack up and apply for citizenship in another country. (Arguably the other country may not allow you entry, which admittedly is a problem, but we could solve that if we gave the same force to international treaties on migrants' rights as we do now to international treaties forcing the free movement of goods.)

        The problem is that government is a

    • "So this is how capitalism works"

      You're confusing the free-market and libertarianism with capitalism.

      It's a common thing to think that everything is either a for-profit thing or a government program.
      It's a common thing to think everything is either government run and bureaucratically administered or its the wild wild west and there are no police around.

      That you don't know the difference between an anarcho-capitalist, a constitutionalist... or any of the other terms and beliefs in between is quite telling. H

    • is this site parading around purporting to be the official Ron Paul domain? No? Then what exactly are your allegations?

      That's exactly the crux of the matter - Ron Paul is acting, and I believe he is confused [billmcgonigle.com] into thinking that he is justified in pursing a trademark claim because last time he pursued a claim over his name he was justified. Ah, hell, I'll just copy the article here (click the link if Slashdot's inability to handle basic Unicode is too uncomfortable):

      Ron Paul is Confused on RonPaul.com
      Posted

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by moeinvt ( 851793 )

      Thanks for the thoughtful post. I might re-visit some of it later. I wanted to make a few points however.

      When libertarians criticize the institution of government, they are not rejecting the idea of "rules". They are objecting to the idea of "ruleRs" who have granted themselves an arbitrary monopoly on the use of violence.

      We have millions of rules now, and millions of police and military enforcers, yet it hasn't eradicated violence. In fact, the more ridiculous rules like drug prohibition have stimulate

    • What is the difference between the New York Times using Ron Paul's name to sell newspapers and this site printing facts about him to make money?

      The newspaper isn't called the New York Ron Paul.

    • Cybersquatting (also known as domain squatting), according to the United States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price.

    • From my understanding, the group made a good faith offering of ronpaul.org to Ron Paul for free but wanted $250,000 for the commercial ronpaul.com in order to recoup the work and effort they put in. On top of that, I see nothing malicious, untruthful, slanderous or libelous on ronpaul.com -- quite the opposite!

      Please read the UDRP [icann.org]. The amount of money and time you put into building the website is irrelevant and non-recoupable. All you can legitimately ask the trademark holder for is your costs to acquire

    • Turning to any -- and I mean ANY -- higher power to subvert that desired price is, by definition, appealing to a governing body to impose some form of regulation.

      You do realize libertarians aren't anarchists, right? They believe in law (such as the courts), arbitration, contracts, government intervention to enforce private property rights. This particular cases hits all those. ICANN has a set of rules that a domain owner enters as terms of doing business -- this is a contract. If you found in breach of

  • Put the straw man away (Score:2, Informative)

    by xda ( 1171531 )
    He isn't trying to change legislation to get ownership of the domain. You can't call someone a hypocrite for following the same rules everyone else is currently following. This is a typical straw man argument against a libertarian minded politician. Create some questionable libertarian standard and then say that they aren't following it.

    I'm not an expert in intelectual property law but I he might have a good case and he would be a fool not to at least try to get ownership of RonPaul.com. This isn't a cas

    • Re:Put the straw man away (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 1u3hr ( 530656 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @03:12PM (#42886545)

      You can't call someone a hypocrite for following the same rules everyone else is currently following.

      Yes you can, if it's something he has said was morally wrong.

    • Re:Put the straw man away (Score:5, Informative)

      by Darkness404 ( 1287218 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @03:26PM (#42886743)
      Except he should have done it 5 bloody years ago when they first started the site. He should have registered the domain names himself (or not let them expire). He should have negotiated with the owners for the domain names. Instead, he waits until a community is established and he can get no further benefit from the people who did the grassroots support of his 2 presidential campaigns and then uses the state (rather than private law, or you know, capitalism) to size the domain. Yes, Ron Paul is a hypocrite, yes he's acting like an absolute ass, yes he most likely has the legal advantage, but that doesn't change the fact that this is morally wrong.

  • No change (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @03:07PM (#42886485)

    Title should still read:

    "Libertarian unwilling to pay market value for property, asks for government help."

    All the semantic wrangling in the world can't get you out of the fact that Ron Paul is going to have to realize that his infantile political philosophy just doesn't work in the real world.

    • "Libertarian unwilling to pay market value for property, asks for government help."

      This is not property in the libertarian sense. This is intellectual property, which is by definition arbitrated by the government. You cannot have a free market solution for a government invention. There is no way for Ron Paul to navigate the world of IP without interacting with some kind of government-enabled entity.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jfengel ( 409917 )

        Then shouldn't he be shying away from this government invention? The domain name is of interest only by government fiat. Everybody has agreed to use ICANN's domain name servers, purely of their own free choice, even though practically all have no idea that they've made it. He's welcome to set up his own alternative system, completely free of government interference. ICANN happens to have a government contract, but it's up to every individual to set their computers up to use it. It just so happens that most

        • I don't think that Ron Paul can singlehandedly break the ICANN monopoly. I would give him kudos for trying, but I wouldn't call him a hypocrite for not taking on that battle. Personally, I think ICANN does a pretty good job - but I also don't call myself a libertarian.

        • Then shouldn't he be shying away from this government invention?

          No, because case law and precedence is on Ron Paul's side. The current owners of the domain are in breach of ICANN contractual terms. He's handling it the same way any other private entity would handle such a breach, via the arbitrator (or legal system, which isn't possible in this case).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by moeinvt ( 851793 )

      The "real world" has burdened us with institutions which may be antithetical to our basic beliefs, but are essential for carrying out many basic functions.

      For example, government has used its power to shape the transportation infrastructure and exert monopoly control over most of it. Do I use government roads? Yes. Why? Because government killed off any significant competition in transportation ~100 years before I was born.

      Even die-hard libertarians recognize the need for some sort of arbitration system

  • Ayn Rand would be rolling in her grave if Cheney and the Koch brothers hadn't dug her corpse up in 1981 and made it into a tasty stew which they consumed with a fine bottle of Chianti.

  • Really... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Darkness404 ( 1287218 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @03:20PM (#42886661)
    Ron Paul is in the wrong here for a number of reasons.

    A) He should have not let that domain expire in the first place. The way I see it, he decided not to renew those domains, some supporters registered it and started a website promoting his campaign.

    B) He failed to even ASK the guys for their domain name until after they'd built up a huge community.

    C) The guys owning Ronpaul.com/Ronpaul.org even offered to just give him ronpaul.org. The next thing you know, he just hits them with a UN letter.

    This is really a dick move by Ron Paul (and I say this as a proud Anarcho-Capitalist/Libertarian and a supporter of his presidential campaigns).

  • Libertarian take on cybersquatting? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @03:33PM (#42886817)

    I'd love to read a libertarian take on "cybersquatting". I can't even define the notion of cybersquatting without involving government or human rights.

    Here's my attempt at a libertarian definition of cybersquatting. Cybersquatting is when you enter into a private contract with a party to be listed in their directory under the name "X", and someone else claims that they "ought" themselves to be the ones who are listed under that name. Okay, that's fine, but a libertarian wouldn't recognize this "ought" and so no claim of cybersquatting would have any basis for a libertarian.

    Here's my attempt at a statist definition of cybersquatting. The state or superstate recognizes that individuals have an interest in their own identities, and companies in their own brands, and it creates a framework of regulations to protect those interests, and it delegates the authority to do this, and it coerces people through threat of force to abide by that authority. Cybersquatting is when someone breaks the state's regulations in this regard."

    So please, to any libertarians -- can you give me a purely libertarian explanation of why cybersquatting is wrong?

    (or will you merely give an explanation of why this particular RP.com situation has contravened the arbitrary rules set by ICANN, while admitting that an alternative ICANN2 without such rules would be entirely fine from a libertarian perspective? How would free market forces chose between ICANN as it currently is, vs ICANN2 without those rules?)

    • So please, to any libertarians -- can you give me a purely libertarian explanation of why cybersquatting is wrong?

      Well, it relies upon the government creation of intellectual property. I can only think of one larger example of government regulation, and that is the corporation.

      Once you accept the concept of intellectual property, the rules are completely arbitrary. There is no moral case to be made for working within the existing rules, or even for seeking to change the rules. In this case, there is a whole dispute resolution process set up for exactly this sort of thing.

      • Again with the "working within" bullshit. You cannot make use of an available resource and argue against such resource from a moral highground.

        It's like:

        MightyYar: I hate slavery, believe it's agains human rights, it's a sickening violence against all that is good and moral. It's wrong, you should just stop doing it.

        Me: But aren't you the owner of a huge plantation exploiting hundreads of slaves kidnaped from africa?

        MightyYar: Oh well I'm just working within the system I find myself in. I paid the taxes tha

        • You are trying to elevate an IP dispute to a moral dispute. Slavery is quite obviously a moral problem, whom get's to use a domain name is a simple civil disagreement with an established resolution mechanism.

          • But Libertarianism defines itself as a moral stance and an utilitarian aproach. Regulation is worng they say, regulation doesn't even work, they say. Specifically Ron Paul says the US should get out of the UN. The UN is evil, it's full of commies and muslims and jews and cooties. We don't want it and we don't need it. The Free Market is all we need, it fixes everything, except this one time please UN help me here on this one. *then* go fuck yourself we don't want you. That's the hippocrisy. The slavery exam

            • Of course he's using those resources - their authority is forced upon him.

              An analogy would be using a local toll road despite being against tolls.

    • So please, to any libertarians -- can you give me a purely libertarian explanation of why cybersquatting is wrong?

      If cybersquatters are engaged in fraud ("Welcome to the Ford Motor Company's website. We've filed bankruptcy and have discontinued the site"), that's prior aggression, so it's wrong.

      Otherwise it's simply a matter of who holds a potentially valuable asset and what price the market will bear for that asset.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

        If cybersquatters are engaged in fraud ("Welcome to the Ford Motor Company's website. We've filed bankruptcy and have discontinued the site"), that's prior aggression, so it's wrong.

        However, it's the visitors to the site who would be the ones being defrauded. Not Ron Paul himself.

        • However, it's the visitors to the site who would be the ones being defrauded. Not Ron Paul himself.

          That's true, but Paul (or Ford in the example) could still be damaged (have to expend time and money to counter the claims) as a consequence of the fraud.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BCoates ( 512464 )

      Cybersqatting might or might not be "wrong", but "wrong" doesn't have anything to do with either private rules or government laws.

      I'm not even clear where the government gets involved in this at all, for good or for ill.

      Domain registrars accept money to list someone as the owner of a domain name. ICANN coordinates this action, approving registrars and setting some ground rules for how registration works. Most ISPs and site operators configure their networks to resolve non-local names only via ICANN approv

    • >>So please, to any libertarians -- can you give me a purely libertarian explanation of why cybersquatting is wrong?

      Because it's rude.

    • So please, to any libertarians -- can you give me a purely libertarian explanation of why cybersquatting is wrong?

      Let's say there's a private entity controlling domain names. Lets call them ICANT. For whatever reason, they've garnered sufficient trust that all the world's DNS servers point to them, and have an effective monopoly on domain registrations.

      People register domain names. ICANT has a series of rules about who can register what domain names - no extended ASCII characters, no profanity, no using other people or businesses names, no using the domain name for a criminal enterprise, etc. These are all private rule

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

        LordLucless, you haven't answered the question "what is the libertarian take on cybersquatting". All you've said is that, supposing that a monopoly already exists which issues contracts against cybersquatting, then contracts will naturally rule against cybersquatting. Well, that's obvious.

        In my OP I anticipated your answer. I specifically asked that, if you're going to follow your route then -- given one ICANN which makes anti-cybersquatting contracts, and another ICANN2 which doesn't, what free market mech

        • LordLucless, you haven't answered the question "what is the libertarian take on cybersquatting". All you've said is that, supposing that a monopoly already exists which issues contracts against cybersquatting, then contracts will naturally rule against cybersquatting. Well, that's obvious.

          Libertarians aren't some homogenous group, and even if they were, I'm not their spokesperson. I can't give you the Libertarian take on cybersquatting, because it doesn't exist.

          In my OP I anticipated your answer. I specifically asked that, if you're going to follow your route then -- given one ICANN which makes anti-cybersquatting contracts, and another ICANN2 which doesn't, what free market mechanism do you think will make one of them dominant?

          Assuming that their anti-cybersquatting provisions are the only issues that distinguish the two, then I imagine either end-user satisfaction (not continually hitting ad-speweing squatting sites) and lower costs (not having to deal with legal disputes arising from court cases over trademarks and such like) would advantage the anti-squa

  • One useful thing should come out of this. (Score:3)

    by runeghost ( 2509522 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @03:40PM (#42886903)

    It ought to make it easier to separate the honest libertarians, those who sincerely hold to their beliefs on the free market, from the Paul cultists who just believe whatever their idol(s) are saying today.

    • To be honest a lot of RP fans only wanted to legalize weed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by moeinvt ( 851793 )

      Belief in the free market does not preclude belief in the need for an arbitration system to settle disputes.

      I'm not agreeing completely with Ron Paul on this one. I think he and the people who registered "ronpaul.com" both have valid arguments and that the case should be settled by a 3rd party arbitrator. Based on the previously established rules, it appears that the avenues for arbitration have been reduced to one and it's being used.

      It's exactly like the government transportation system. It doesn't mak

      • Or he could, you know, *actually pay* the people who established, maintain, and own the domain. Ron Paul's 2012 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination spent over $40 million. Some quick googling shows that the domain owners (who are quite obviously running a real website and not cyber-squatting) are asking for a fraction of what his presidential campaign spent on postage, and less than they spent on "political strategy consulting", campaign merch, or airfare.

        I agree, that it's a very honest exa

  • The problem here is that people fail to realize that the internet isn't a preexisting place, but rather it is system build and operated by people. Those people need to be able to set rules, such as prohibiting cybersquatting, in order to continue to offer a useful service. If someone types in RonPaul into their browser, they are probably looking for Ron Paul's website. Sending them to a fan site or a site belonging to someone else degrades the quality of the service.

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