Is there a letter of the law vs spirit of the law distinction in Ireland?

I'm getting Siegel.ie registered with the IEDR and doing a few posts along the way. I expected to learn some tech tidbits through the process, but didn't expect to see so much fabric of culture exposed. Let me explain.

In my last post I mentioned this "Unincorporated Association." It's a nifty catch-all for anyone not doing anything as a Corporation. It is not understood by the IEDR--or most Irish I've spoken to. The IEDR does not use a legal definition of an Unincorporated Association. The right way to move them towards a legal definiton is a legal challenge--but that's a future post.

Why are rules and policies created?

For public entities we expect rules and policies to be stated and adhered to. We want fairness. We want expectations set for predictable results. We want to know what expectations are set for our own performance.

There's an issue here though. We like rules to be concise and clear. Concise and clear--what's the issue?

The issue is that more clarity often requires more rules--while more conciseness requires less rules.

For instance--let's look at the IEDR and their Unincorporated Associations. From one perspective, the IEDR is clear: if you are an Unincorporated Association, send us your blog link and get your domain. From another perspective, the IEDR is not clear at all--rejecting legally valid associations with no accountability.

The IEDR suffers from being too concise--a stated policy that is too terse. There is a hidden agenda in the IEDR policy that is hard to coax out. In this case more clarity--or a verbose policy--would possibly uncover that agenda.

The Agenda

It's clear with our example that there are two types of decisions being made for domain approval: a stated, explicit one, and an implied, implicit one. This is not a surprise since we expect a tradeoff between overspecifying and underspecifying rules in any circumstance.

What is a surprise--is that usually there is a theme--often a best-interest-in-a-discernable-direction that can be infered from looking at the effects of the implicit rules. You might call this "the agenda." And for the IEDR that theme is not clear nor discernable.

Thanks to the bible we have a phrase for what we usually expect from rules--a well stated set of requirements called the "letter of the law" and implied requirements called the "spirit of the law." You know what this means already--covet another man's wife in action--well that's the letter of the law being broken. Do it in your heart and mind only? That's the spirit of the law being broken. And no--it's not my example.

It's really darn easy to see the difference between obeying the stated law vs the implied one. It's also easy to see that a rule like this would have been horrendous to have to spell out.

Rule #17123: Do not put lips of man against lips of other woman.

This is great, except if you are giving CPR! Then you break Rule #17123, fire and brimstone and all that. So you take that rule out--and ecstasy-laden CPR parties become the heavenly rage.

We've got a nice clear theme and see the tradeoffs of letter vs spirit.

Now back to the IEDR. They are aggressive in denying domain names based on non-stated rules. Let's try and divine their deeper purpose.

The IEDR could be following unstated rules to make sure that there is perceived quality in the IE domainspace. Quality on the internet means--not a lot of squatting--high signal vs noise. In a previous post we've shown this not to be the case.

The IEDR could be following unstated rules to keep the IE domainspace "Irishy." Now this is something I thought was happening since Doyle and David and Nolan got their surnames as domain names but Siegel didn't. But this is such an easy rule to make stated--like: No names that aren't in the Irish book of names before 1850.

The IEDR could be following unstated rules to keep any surnames from ever becoming domain names. Now this would contradict the fact that Doyle and David and Muphy are registered.

OK--so a few trys didn't prove fruitful--have a suggestion? Leave it in the comments.

Irony

Without divining a deeper purpose in the IEDR's domain management mayhem, we can still appreciate their irony.

Take Siegel.ie. A domain application has been submitted for Category 6 Publication Name for an Unincorporated Association. The legal constraints and stated policy are fully satisfied; however, the application has been denied.

At the same time--Ireland's a small Country--I keep meeting friends of friends of those darned registrars. They have infered a deeper purpose that I never would have guessed: Don't take away our control.

The registrars have been beaten up before my adventures. They have suffered years of mistakes and the community in Ireland has laid into them. So they have retaliated--by reigning in the only power they have--approving applications--and exercising their power in an arbitrary manner. And an application like mine--that meets the stated policy--has little hope of succeeding on its own merits.