Wrong Turn in Cyberspace: Using ICANN to Route Around the APA and the Constitution

The Internet relies on an underlying centralized hierarchy built into the domain name system (DNS) to control the routing for the vast majority of Internet traffic. At its heart is a single data file, known as the root. Control of the root provides singular power in cyberspace. This Article first describes how the United States government found itself in control of the root. It then describes how, in an attempt to meet concerns that the United States could so dominate an Internet chokepoint, the U. S. Department of Commerce (DoC) summoned into being the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a formally private nonprofit California corporation. DoC then signed contracts with ICANN in order to clothe it with most of the U. S. government\u27s power over the DNS, and convinced other parties to recognize ICANN\u27s authority. ICANN then took regulatory actions that the U. S. Department of Commerce was unable or unwilling to make itself, including the imposition on all registrants of Internet addresses of an idiosyncratic set of arbitration rules and procedures that benefit third-party trademark holders. Professor Froomkin then argues that the use of ICANN to regulate in the stead of an executive agency violates fundamental values and policies designed to ensure democratic control over the use of government power, and sets a precedent that risks being expanded into other regulatory activities. He argues that DoC\u27s use of ICANN to make rules either violates the APA\u27s requirement for notice and comment in rulemaking and judicial review, or it violates the Constitution\u27s nondelegation doctrine. Professor Froomkin reviews possible alternatives to ICANN, and ultimately proposes a decentralized structure in which the namespace of the DNS is spread out over a transnational group of policy partners with DoC

The ambivalent shadow of the pre-Wilsonian rise of international law

The generation of American international lawyers who founded the American Society of International Law in 1906 and nurtured the soil for what has been retrospectively called a “moralistic legalistic approach to international relations” remains little studied. A survey of the rise of international legal literature in the U.S. from the mid-19th century to the eve of the Great War serves as a backdrop to the examination of the boosting effect on international law of the Spanish American War in 1898. An examination of the Insular Cases before the US Supreme Court is then accompanied by the analysis of a number of influential factors behind the pre-war rise of international law in the U.S. The work concludes with an examination of the rise of natural law doctrines in international law during the interwar period and the critiques addressed.by the realist founders of the field of “international relations” to the “moralistic legalistic approach to international relation

A Search for Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem Violations in Spin-Glasses from Susceptibility Data

We propose an indirect way of studying the fluctuation-dissipation relation in spin-glasses that only uses available susceptibility data. It is based on a dynamic extension of the Parisi-Toulouse approximation and a Curie-Weiss treatment of the average magnetic couplings. We present the results of the analysis of several sets of experimental data obtained from various samples.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Area spectra of the rotating BTZ black hole from quasinormal modes

Following Bekenstein's suggestion that the horizon area of a black hole should be quantized, the discrete spectrum of the horizon area has been investigated in various ways. By considering the quasinormal mode of a black hole, we obtain the transition frequency of the black hole, analogous to the case of a hydrogen atom, in the semiclassical limit. According to Bohr's correspondence principle, this transition frequency at large quantum number is equal to classical oscillation frequency. For the corresponding classical system of periodic motion with this oscillation frequency, an action variable is identified and quantized via Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization, from which the quantized spectrum of the horizon area is obtained. This method can be applied for black holes with discrete quasinormal modes. As an example, we apply the method for the both non-rotating and rotating BTZ black holes and obtain that the spectrum of the horizon area is equally spaced and independent of the cosmological constant for both cases

Citizenship:Contrasting Dynamics at the Interface of Integration and Constitutionalism

EUDO Citizenship ObservatoryThis paper explores the different ways in which citizenship has played a role in polity formation in the context of the European Union. It focuses on both the ‘integration’ and the ‘constitution’ dimensions. The paper thus has two substantive sections. The first addresses the role of citizenship of the Union, examining the dynamic relationship between this concept, the role of the Court of Justice, and the free movement dynamic of EU law. The second turns to citizenship in the Union, looking at some recent political developments under which concepts of citizenship, and democratic membership as a key dimension of citizenship, have been given greater prominence. One key finding of the paper is that there is a tension between citizenship of the Union, as part of the EU's ‘old’ incremental constitutionalism based on the constitutionalisation of the existing Treaties, and citizenship in the Union, where the possibilities of a ‘new’ constitutionalism based on renewed constitutional documents have yet to be fully realise

The Quantized O(1,2)/O(2)×Z2O(1,2)/O(2)\times Z_2 Sigma Model Has No Continuum Limit in Four Dimensions. I. Theoretical Framework

The nonlinear sigma model for which the field takes its values in the coset space $O(1,2)/O(2)\times Z_2$ is similar to quantum gravity in being perturbatively nonrenormalizable and having a noncompact curved configuration space. It is therefore a good model for testing nonperturbative methods that may be useful in quantum gravity, especially methods based on lattice field theory. In this paper we develop the theoretical framework necessary for recognizing and studying a consistent nonperturbative quantum field theory of the $O(1,2)/O(2)\times Z_2$ model. We describe the action, the geometry of the configuration space, the conserved Noether currents, and the current algebra, and we construct a version of the Ward-Slavnov identity that makes it easy to switch from a given field to a nonlinearly related one. Renormalization of the model is defined via the effective action and via current algebra. The two definitions are shown to be equivalent. In a companion paper we develop a lattice formulation of the theory that is particularly well suited to the sigma model, and we report the results of Monte Carlo simulations of this lattice model. These simulations indicate that as the lattice cutoff is removed the theory becomes that of a pair of massless free fields. Because the geometry and symmetries of these fields differ from those of the original model we conclude that a continuum limit of the $O(1,2)/O(2)\times Z_2$ model which preserves these properties does not exist.Comment: 25 pages, no figure