In an effort to be as factual in my articles as possible, I have to write a slight correction to one of my latest articles entitled,CISPA redux; So-called 'cybersecurity' rears its ugly head again. While the fundamental story remains the same, I did report that Ron Paul was suing the owners of RonPaul.com over trademark infringement. This is not true. There is a dispute pending with the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), but it is not a law suit and the dispute is not going before a governing body like the UN.
The initial report was based on information found on a blog post coming from RonPaul.com who published legal documents regarding an ICANN complaint. ICANN is an international regulatory non-profit, with connections to the UN, but not a direct arm of the UN, and everyone who purchases a domain must agree to a contract created by ICANN.
The bloggers stated in the opening paragraph,
Earlier today, Ron Paul filed an international UDRP complaint against RonPaul.com and RonPaul.org with WIPO, a global governing body that is an agency of the United Nations. The complaint calls on the agency to expropriate the two domain names from his supporters without compensation and hand them over to Ron Paul.
There are now sources close to Ron Paul trying to defend his dispute filing. Israel Anderson of "Am I Libertarian?" and RonPaulFlix.com created a video response (above) February 11th, about the incident noting that Paul is simply following procedures as indicated in the contract that the owners of RonPaul.com agreed to.
While libertarians tend to recoil when it comes to economic regulation, they advocate contractual agreements as the means of "regulating" the free market. It is interesting to note that the owner of RonPaul.com is recoiling from his contractual agreement and inciting Paul as violating the principles of the free market.
Close friend of Ron Paul and founder of the Ludvig von Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell, also posted in response, today, to what he called "disinformation" being spread through the blogosphere. He states,
--Ron is not using the State to acquire RonPaul.com. He could have brought a lawsuit in US government courts, but he did not. 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. 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.
Rockwell further clarifies a number of other points, which can be found here.
Many supporters of Ron Paul began criticizing Paul after his seemingly premature exit from his presidential campaign. This created a fracture in the liberty movement that seems to have been further deepened by the disinformation being propagated on the Internet about this dispute.
What are your thoughts? Do you believe this infighting is good for the liberty movement? Should the domain owner have kept this a private matter, rather than publicizing a simple dispute? Is Ron Paul in the wrong for not purchasing the domain name from domain owners? If the free market can work on an International scale, does ICANN hurt or hinder that goal? Comment below and share this article.
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