On 26 Oct 2016, at 11:34, Shane Kerr <shane@time-travellers.org> wrote:
I am curious what kinds of legal restrictions would prevent publishing a contract, but that's not really important. They exist!
Shane, commercial contracts are almost always confidential because they contain information which is commercially sensitive: SLAs, price, how/where the service is delivered, escalation/support arrangements, points of contact etc. I expect your contract of employment with BII and BII's contracts with its bandwidth and hosting providers will not be public for similar reasons.
Still... certainly there is precedent for publishing such details - for example the Verisign Cooperative Agreement with the NTIA (NCR 92-18742).
That's for something *very* different from DNS hosting. You're comparing apples and oranges.
If the community thinks that it is important, does it make sense to ask that future contracts be open? This would be clear to anyone responding to an RfP in advance and could avoid any restrictions.
It makes no sense at all. In fact, a move like that would pretty much guarantee no reputable supplier will submit a bid. Why do that if the details of your offer are going to be exposed to your competitors if you win the RFP? The nature of this contract is implementation detail and therefore out of scope for the WG. Our involvement should be on the outcome of that contract. ie Is the outsourced hosting service working well or not and if not, what steps should be taken to correct that.