Hank Nussbacher wrote...

On Sun, 21 Sep 1997 13:21:44 +0200 you said:

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Great - a force that has zero control over the whole IAHC "process". Static electricity. We can not become part of the PAB because we can not sign the gTLD-MoU. It is an overly bureaucratic, flawed document that in the end solves very little, hinders free enterprise and gives ISOC and IANA power of attorney over the gTLD part of the Internet.

I hate to break it to you, but IANA now holds 100% control of the gTLDs as well as the nTLDs.

Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. The IANA doesn't even say this. Don't you think it a little ridiculous for basically a one man operation which is not a formal organization, but rather a named administrative task carried out by ISI/USC to be the sole decision maker for the future of all Internet TLDs? One non-entity decides the future of many multi-million dollar issues? I don't think so. By the way, ISI/Postel only started calling their task "IANA" as little as two years ago. Even USC says they are a non-control non-entity. See the quotes at the bottom of: http://www.wia.org/pub/iana.html `1997 USC General Counsel, acting on behalf of Jon Postel as a USC staff member in the suit Image Online Design v. IANA, et al, states for the record that IANA is not "a separate entity," but rather " a task performed by Dr. Postel under contract between USC and an agency of the federal government."' ISI/USC/Jon Postel (aka IANA) was hired by the US Government to take care of numeric assignments for protocols, IP address distribution, etc. Most recently the funding and direction comes from the FNC (Federal Networking Council) which is under the CCIC (Committee on Computing, Information, and Communications) which is under the NSTC (National Science and Technology Council) which is under the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Although part of the US Government, the FNC is representative not only of many government agencies, but takes advice from non-government entities. The FNC has members from a lot of interesting US Government agencies and has an Advisory Committee (FNCAC) made up of civilian "senior representatives from technical, industrial, academic and user communities", like people from AT&T, Bellcore, CU, Chrysler, Cisco, Harvard, IBM, LBL, Lockheed, MCI, MCNC, SDSC, Stanford, Sun, etc. For a complete list of both, see: http://www.fnc.gov/FNC_Members.html http://www.fnc.gov/FNCAC_members.html This organization is much more representative of the whole of the Internet than the IAHC or any of it's other acronyms. If the FNC hired "ISI/USC/Jon Postel (aka IANA)" to take care of iTLDs and their insertion into the root, etc, then it follows that the FNC/US Government owns the root and the iTLDs. They invented it, and at the very least they took on the responsibility of managing the numbers and the top of DNS up to now. And they funded it. For over a year their Advisory Committee has recommended that the FNC/NSF get out of the domain name business and transfer "responsibility from NSF to an appropriate entity." As far as I can tell, they have not done so yet. In fact their April Minutes state that the NSF specifically has NOT turned this responsibility over to an outside organization. And the FNC says: "Following U.S. Government lead, the Federal Networking Council (FNC) has no policy concerning the IAHC proposal. The FNC Co-Chair, George Strawn, participated in the IAHC, and the FNC continues to encourage open discussion on domain name registration." I wonder if Jon Postel will insert the IAHC TLDs into the root servers if the FNC tells him not to? Hmmmm.... Additionally, NSI runs the primary root DNS server and NSI is also under contract with NSF. So if the FNC said no, I guess it wouldn't happen. Or visa-versa if they said "do it". As I see it, the US Government has always had control over the root and thus DNS and the creation of all TLDs. They may decide that they should not maintain control, but they are reviewing that issue in detail before doing something to screw things up. As NSI's proposal suggested, I would expect an orderly transition to be made to an appropriate, legal, international organization. Who, what and how has to be decided very carefully - not by the IANA.

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And it doesn't even touch on the biggest related problem we have, which is what happens to the "." and who controls it. You ought not to architect an office building before making sure the foundation can be laid on a stable surface.

The gTLD MoU and all related items do not cover "." or nTLDs. Here is where RIPE and other organizations can step in and propose what should be done (at least one view - there are many). The IAHC/POC was not mandated to touch ".".

If I were mandated to figure out what happens to gTLDs in the future, I most certainly would include what happens to the root in my proposal. It is *the* most key technical issue related to DNS and the stability of the internet and the stability of the IAHC proposal. It is one of the main reasons why Postel published his initial gTLD draft which later became the IAHC thing. [By the way, I think the original Postel draft was much more in order than what the IAHC came up with.] But... the IAHC/gTLD-MoU/PAB/iPOC/CORE/WHATEVER didn't and hasn't addressed the dot. For the IAHC proposal to have its desired effect on the DNS and the registration and trademark issues it attempts to address, it needs to be sure that it controls all the gTLDs. But if it doesn't have a stable dot then it may not only be ineffective, but actually have a detrimental effect on the Internet as a whole and the end-users thereof. Not very clever in my view. Ray http://www.STOP-gTLD-MoU.org/ -------- Logged at Mon Sep 22 15:49:54 MET DST 1997 ---------