RE: [ga] RE: is ICANN or is ICANN not?

["Roberto Gaetano" <roberto@xxxxxxxxx>]

Elisabeth Porteneuve wrote:

> Let us to be fair, it helps.

It sure helps. Let me reply to your comments in reverse order.

> 
> I do hope that ICANN learned the lesson as well.
> 
It did, I can assure you.
That's also why it is now looking for community input on TLD sunset, before
taking action on .su.


> Eventually ICANN woke up, and accepted to join the ISO 
> 3166/MA (and spent
> 3 years not participating in any ISO 3166/MA debate or 
> meeting; the very first ICANN's deleguee to ISO 3166/MA 
> showed up last August).
The proposal to ICANN to join ISO was done well after, and as a consequence
of, the CS affaire.
There was indeed a delay in sending the first deleguee, but this was
completely irrelevant for the case in point, which had already happened.


> 
> The ICANN was well aware of using ISO 3166-1 2-letters 
> standard, but had no clue that they have to communicate with 
> ISO 3166/MA to take care of a standard they are relying upon.
ICANN knew perfectly that it had to communicate to ISO. The communication
between ICANN and ISO dates back to the days of the establishment of EU in
ISO-3166, as prerequisite for the delegation of .eu.
However, this has not prevented ISO to take the unwise, to say the least,
decision to reallocate CS in spite of the fact that it was perfectly aware
that the code could have been a candidate ccTLD, but without analyzing what
were the consequences. I happen to know one of the 5 voting members of that
time (you might guess who that was), we spoke at length about the matter,
and I was horrified by the lack of knowledge and consideration of potential
problems. All this happened when ICANN was not a member yet.

I don't want to hide the responsibility of ICANN in this story, but my
initial point was not who is more responsible, but the fact that ICANN
should not rely blindly for mission-critical operations, like the delegation
of the ccTLDs, on a standard on which it has no control (even if now, being
a voting member, at least its input is taken into account).

Incidentally, talking about transparency of decision process, can somebody
point me to the call for comments by potentially affected parties, or the
minutes of the discussion at ISO 3166/MA that has ended with the decision of
redelegating the CS to Serbia and Montenegro? Maybe ICANN has something to
learn for its own process transparency, that is so often blamed.

Cheers,
Roberto