Re: [ga] Re: ICANN before the US Senate...

[Eric Dierker <eric@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Seperation sounds great Karl but that ain't in the green and white papers.
Furthermore if techies and pollywogs don't work together you get a CIA/FBI 
debacle. One hand is hitting while the other plays footsie.  Plus you 
further our divides of technical/developing communities-- bla bla bla.

This is important stuff here. 
If you in your fancy seat at board hearings does not stand up for the 
dotcommoner policies who does?
Sometimes limitation of mission means refusal to take responsibility.

Keep the Juice flowing good men women.

There is a place and time for solace and a place and time for conflict, 
please choose them wisely and remember those matters we cannot change should 
be left alone, those we can for the better should be. Progress is in the eye 
of the beholder.
Eric

> On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> 
>> But let's stop that "Stick with technical matters" b...t.
> 
> I say "Let ICANN stick with technical matters."
> 
> As you say, some matters do have policy implications - in which case
> they  are policy matters and better left to bodies that actually try to
>  encompass the parties affected by the parties.  And I believe there is
>  overwhelming consensus that ICANN doesn't fit anybody's definition of 
> encompassing all the parties who are affected by its decisions.
> 
> This is why, in my senate submission -
> http://www.cavebear.com/rw/senate-july-31-2003.htm - and in other
> materials, I have suggested a guideline to decide when a matter is
> primarily technical or when it has enough policy components that it
> ought to be handled by a structure rather more synoptic than ICANN.
> 
> Let's look at the cases you mention:
> 
>> 1) Who will decide of the redelegation of a ccTLD? Especially in
>> complicated cases like a fight between two local groups? This is not a
>> clerical process, it is a political one, by essence.
> 
> I was, and continue to be concerned, that ICANN is being used by
> political groups in countries as a means of fighting against other
> political groups in those countries.  Recent examples where I felt
> concern in this regard were when we (ICANN) redelegated the cc
> administration for Afghanistan and Sudan.  I would say that it is the
> rare entity that is good at both  writing down protocol parameters and
> deciding which among competing, and  perhaps warring, groups deserves
> the nod to literally own a country's  ccTLD.
> 
> ICANN's staff does like to travel around the world and act as the
> arbiters of who is the best government for countries - some of the
> staff reports I saw were gaggingly paternalistic in that regard.  I
> felt that the
> imperialist days of Queen Victoria and King Leopold had returned and
> ensconsed themselves in Marina del Rey.
> 
>> 2) Who will decide what gTLD to create?
> 
> Again, the skills used to allocate protocol numbers are not necessarily
> the same when deciding how to regulate a complex economic system.  Many
> analogies have been drawn between DNS TLDs and the radio frequency
> spectrum allocation system.  Two points are most visible in that
> comparision:  First is that spectrum, as opposed to TLDs is actually
> allocated, TLD allocation has come to a standstill.  And second, there
> is actually a technical component in frequency matters - there's not
> really much of a technical question whether the net will go unstable,
> in the sense that packets stop flowing and existing names stop
> resolving, if a new TLD is added.
> 
>> 3) Who will decide to recognize (or not) Afrinic as a new RIR?
> 
> This was actually the subject of my last conversation with Jon Postel. 
>  The throught was that RIRs are logically representative of lumps of
> connectivity - that, like Wirth's concept of modularity based on
> minimal information flow between modules - RIRs are best defined by
> clumping chunks of address space so that the richness of the routing
> infrastructure between the chunks is minimized.
> 
> The bodies best suited to answer that question are the RIRs themselves
> -  they know when, from the point of view of the net's routing 
> infrastructure, when it is better to split a RIR or to coelesce.
> 
> 		--karl--