Jay,
May I start by making one thing clear: I am a member of CORE, and this choice of mine suggests that there is some basic disagreement between ourselves that we will not be able to solve with just a couple of messages. Nevertheless, I think that rather than looking at this difference, we should look at our similarities, pretty much as two human beings of different race, that for long time may be opposed by the colour of the skin before realizing this to be a minor detail compared to the rest.
The rest is being part of the Net. The rest is being part of the international community that is overcoming physical borders like mountains, rivers and oceans; overcoming national and political borders like walls and barbed wire; building a common network that unites people of different culture and language.
I agree with you thinking here compleatly. But lets try to keep things in perspective. The GP is an leadership effort for just such international cooperation, not a government intervention of any kind as I read it.
Well read it again. It's talking about USG decisions all over it. There's NOTHING about international cooperation there.
The MoU is a select group self appointed from a leadership standpoint to carve off the Domain Name system with tossing in some 7 new gTLD's and planning to take over the managment of .com, .net, and .org without the benifit of a broad consensus even and making the entry fee of $10k to become a member of CORE and thereby register Domain names. This is like joining a "Country Club". Not a true cooperative effort. Hence the Department of Commerce and others have ask for the US governments help, and now recieved it in the form of the GP, with very broad input already.
Have you read the requirements in the GP for being a registry? (24hour guards, connectivity, redundant sites etc...) I'd pitch that at somewhere in the region of $200K *at least*. And also note the subtle way that they mention the requirements of the registrars. It's hinting at more of the same. In comparison, the 10K joining fee of CORE is CHEAP!!! (And I've always argued that the $10K was only to get CORE running, once it WAS up and running, as it would be managed on cost recovery, then the amount charged to "join" would be very low). Note also that the GP just says that registries will treat all registrars equally (eg: As I'm a registry holding ".com", if you want to be a registrar of mine you will pay me $20K) The GP is setting up lots of country clubs all around. It's taking the worse bits and increasing them. Doing well so far. And the MoU is *not* just a small group appointing people,the signatures are coming from loads of different places (I haven't done a count lately but I'd say its nearing 200 organisations). PAB membership is open to just about all. CORE looks as if it will be re-opening membership applications. POC is *currently* looking how to redo the setup, but even in its current form it takes members from all types of different organisations (ISOC, IAB, IANA, WIPO, -you all know the rest-). The GP however is basically a document written up by Ira Magaziner and pals with lots of lobbying from strong interests. Guess who's benefitting most from the GP? It's NSI. CORE, under the GP would almost certainly get a TLD and if they coulddo it well, maybe they would even be able to setup a few different non-profit organisation (in the CORE format) and merit more than one new TLD. NSI is written into the document in no uncertain terms. Do you think that Kashpureff, Jay Fenello, the eDNS crowd etc... would be able to meet the criteria? For one, allof them want to do business as registry AND registrar, and the way that the GP is set out just hurts them. CORE could get something, the others will get nothing. And lets not forget that it pospones just about doing anything for a longish period. So, it's the Status Quo for probably a year or more under that proposal.
I completely agree with you that anarchy is not the best solution, that at some point some rules have to be enforced, that some decisions have to be made. My point is that these rules have to be enforced by ourselves, and those decisions have to be made by ourselves, the cybernauts. We have to grow up to the point in which we decide for ourselves, and resist the temptation to have "big brother" decide for all of us.
The MoU is is very much look upon as a private "Big Brother" method of gaining minority control of the Domain name system. This is painfully evidant in the lack of support from the majority of Internet citizens around the world and company's and orginizations as well.
May I ask what support does the GP have? Apart from USG (yea, it's no small thing, but it looks as if it's just Ira's baby...)
And being forced by and external set of policies is exactly what the MoU does or provides for, whithout the benifit of a truely open process. If the use of a democratic process, this would not be the case with respect to the MoU and it's subsidearies (PAB/POC/CORE).
Huh? Could you explain the difference between the way the USG has produced it's GP and the way the IAHC produced the gTLD-MoU? : USG: set up an RFC, then went away and kept silent until the suddenly came out and published a document (you don't even know WHO wrote the document. For all we know it could have been just one person). In any case, they took notice of the comments that they wanted to take note of and ignored those that they wanted to ignore. Apparently they had something like 1500 responses to the RFC. In the case of the IAHC, there were members from ITU (representing telco's), members from WIPO (representing the trademark group), and members appointed from different "I" associations amongst others. A *lot* of discussion was carried out in the open on mailing lists etc. (Have you ever seen Ira or *any* USG official ask any questions on any mailing lists and/or enter ANY type of debate?), and then they went away and talked amongst themselves and came out with a document. To be fair, I think that there is NO openess in the way the USG has created the GP. One can argue if there was a lot or a little openess in the IAHC process, but it takes a fool to think that the IAHC was less open. Yours, John Broomfield -------- Logged at Mon Feb 9 03:13:42 MET 1998 ---------