Re: [ga] RE: Whois more in detail

[JFC Morfin <jefsey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 19:42 11/01/2007, Kim Davies said:
> Quoting JFC Morfin on Thursday January 11, 2007:
> | Kim Davis acknowledged that NTIA knows perfectly what ICANN does and
> | interfaces with ICANN on a daily basis.
>
> If you are referring to me, what I said on another list, is that NTIA is
> fully informed of IANA's policy work on retiring country code domains
> for countries that no longer exist.
>
> It is disingenuous to construe that as saying "NTIA knows perfectly what
> ICANN does" in the broadest context. Maybe they do, but I don't know so
> I certainly wouldn't make that claim.

Dear Kim,
This is very unjust of you to write. My reading was the most 
conservative one possible that could ever come from a quote like this:
- Question: "Are you suggesting ICANN has knowledge to the contrary, 
please give specific examples?"
- Your answer: "We're generally in touch with NTIA every other day or 
so. They are fully informed of our work in this area. They, like 
everyone else, are interested in IANA policies and procedures being 
clear, well documented, and transparent. One of the reasons we're 
undertaking this consultation is to help us clarify and document our 
policies and procedures."

I took the "we" for ICANN. Of which you are part of.

Therefore, you actually mean by this that during the public query 
period concerning a decision, which we took 10 minutes to make in 
1978, you need to call the NTIA every other day or so? I do not 
understand this at all.

1) ICANN decided to consider harming the world digital ecosystem 
stability in replacing ISO 3166 as the Internet international 
structural referent. In doing so ICANN would change 29 years of 
constant practice, which is supported by Jon Postel in RTC 920, RFC 
1591, and ccTLD Memo #1 and by ICP-1.

2) we could presume that this decision was prepared, matured, and 
made long ago, when NTIA published its Statements of Principle, IESG 
approved the WG-LTRU Charter, Brian Carpenter and Harald Alvestrand 
switched jobs of IETF Chair and Unicode BoD Member, Congress voted on 
the resolution regarding US sovereignty on the Internet, Ambassador 
David Gross signed the Tunis agreement, IESG approved and then 
disrespected RFC 4646, etc. Why, therefore, such febricity? And why 
is this febricity involving the NTIA?

You obviously realise the attention that will be brought forth from 
many Governments, Business leaders, Civil Society concerns, 
International and standardisation entities when considering the 
following chain of facts:

1) IETF, ICANN, IANA, ANSI, etc. always respected ISO 3166, in order 
to tell the country code of a country. These codes are two alpha for 
currently sovereign countries and their separated territories and 
four alpha for countries that no longer exist. There is no hiatus, 
and if there was one by error, ICANN is a Member of the ISO 3166 MA 
committee in order to be able to raise such a need.

2) a strategy appears to have developed at the W3C and IETF to 
challenge this through RFC 4646. It created an IANA LSE Registry as 
an Internet referent for countries, scripts, and languages. That 
referent has the capacity to differ from ISO 3166, 15924, and 639 to 
provide supposed more adequate services to the Internet community. No 
other provision has been considered to maintain ISO interoperability 
than to place its evaluation and review process under open the 
sponsoring of the IANA. However, the IESG maintains it under the 
practical control of the industry main stakeholders through a private 
mailing list owned and staffed by a Member of the BoD of the Unicode 
consortium (of which the President co-authored RFC 4646).

3) under the same pretence, ICANN decided to publicly raise the issue 
of the ccTLD of the countries that no longer exist, without 
concerting first with the WSIS, the IGF community, the GAC, and even 
the ISO 3166 RA (however, it just eventually resumed attending that 
committee). In refusing the automatic allocation of four alpha codes 
for former existent countries it would make these countries' history, 
archives, registrant investment, etc. only dependent from its private 
goodwill.

4) until now, we could reasonably think that all this reflected a 
strategy of the Unicode consortium, or of its leading Member(s), 
taking an advantage from US doctrine and international agreements. 
This thinking resulted from its/their hiring programme and use of the 
most eminent persons involved. This also resulted from the 
discriminatory attitude (that I was asked to make fully exposed, see 
the IETF site), against competitive architectures for a free and user 
centric multilingual and semantic Internet, and my RFC 4646 
successful tweaking in order to preserve any possible ISO interoperability.

Such a project would be the first world coup, a pre-emptive takeover 
of the semantic Internet referent (a market worth billions of 
dollars). It was surprising because it is not credible. It would 
eventually seriously harm US industry in creating instability and 
incertitude over the world normative referent. It would backfire due 
to national counter propositions, which now would easily ally through 
the IGF. This looks another terribly misinformed commercial dream.

The only possibility for it to work would be for the IANA LSE 
registry to be innocuously introduced, without Governments and 
Industries noticing it before it has de facto become the root of the 
Internet normative referentials. However, the IANA and its objective 
sponsors should also have encapsulated the ISO's, and the other 
leading SSDOs', publications into a new normative catalogue that they 
would structure, publish, support, and sell. In order to appeal to 
the users, it should probably include the data of common good that is 
necessary to navigate the semantic Internet. Such dominance would 
call for a Google, Yahoo!, or Microsoft equivalent system in size. It 
would also mean that English would become the sole normative 
language, ending the ISO French/English parallel work and publication 
(like it started with ISO 639-3?). This alone would introduce all the 
normative confusion that this double parallel work currently 
prevents, and QoS would call to extend to Chinese or Japanese 
languages, due to the complimentary form of analysis this would imply.

You, therefore, measure the importance of your two last mails.

1) the NTIA is fully informed of the ICANN part of the operation that 
you conduct, which we can conceive as a part of this possible plan.

2) the NTIA is informed through phone calls every other day or so 
(during a period when you only wait for mails to come in). Unless the 
NTIA equivalents for the 191 other Governments are also informed 
every other day or so, which indicates special attention given to 
NTIA guidance. Since the matter being discussed has not been 
introduced at the WSIS or at the IGF, and is not transparently 
broadcasted, this implies the disrespect of the political, economic, 
civil society, and international organisations (including SSDOs) 
along with the multistakeholdership of the WSIS and IGF.

I would like to believe that I am confused. If this is the case, I 
propose to you a very simple way to clarify the ongoing confusion. 
Let us jointly introduce a short IETF I_D, stating that the Internet 
referents, in terms of time, locale and country, language, and script 
codes, are ISO 8601, ISO 15897, ISO 3166 series, ISO 15924, and ISO 
639 series, and that the links will be provided on the IANA site to 
their ISO URLs.

I hope this helps in clarifying the issue. Thank you for your time 
and attention.
jfc