[ga] Is ICANN turning down Jon Postel's Internet key ISO reference and stability? (was: Whois more in detail)

[JFC Morfin <jefsey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:30 15/01/2007, Kim Davies wrote:
> > Quoting JFC Morfin on Saturday January 13, 2007:
> > 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.
>
> "in this area" refers to the topic that was under discussion on that 
> mailing list, which was retiring ccTLDs for countries that no longer 
> exist, and was clearly never a claim relating to all of ICANN's work.
>
> There appears to be no point rationalising with you. You're the only 
> one that doesn't seem to comprehend the context of that 
> conversation. Again, this was a discussion on another list about a 
> specific topic, and your citation is incorrect. To suggest that the 
> most conservative way to intepret my comments is that they apply to 
> all of ICANN is, to be frank, crazy.

Dear Kim,
I regret your response. There is no rationalising involved. I only 
politely explained as to why the consensus of a group of your readers 
that I belong to, who are worried by the dependency of ICANN on the 
NTIA, considered your first sentence to have answered Paul's first 
sentence, and your second sentence answered Paul's second one.

From your rude response we learned that it is "crazy" to think that 
ICANN is only in touch with the NTIA once every other day. This is 
important information, which I greatly thank you for. Additionally, 
it is important information that NTIA are "like everyone else", 
however, I am not certain that you take the time to get in touch with 
"everyone else" at the same frequency.

> In respect for the GA list members' time, I'll leave it at that. I 
> just wanted to correct the record on what you're falsely attributing to me.

Your mail is confusing because it is common to state to people, who 
are asking an embarrassing question, that they are crazy, that they 
made an incorrect citation when they pasted your text, or that one 
will respect the list members' time in not answering the question. 
So, GA Members could misunderstand and only pay more attention to the 
missing ".suhh" to replace ".su" as per the ISO 3166 series. What is 
not necessary if all this is only a false alarm.

You can be sure that your response interests the GA list members. As 
someone put it yesterday about another topic: "this list can and [] 
should debate this topic and see if there are any recommendations we 
can make or any action we can initiate on behalf of users. [] this 
list [is not] just to hammer away at ICANN, but is a list to discuss 
issues that affect Internet users worldwide." The question raised 
also interests Internet users worldwide. Disregarding that question 
would only confirm the reality of their concerns, which is why I 
propose a joint action to address them and confort a stable, 
transparent, and wholly supported ICANN/IETF position.

Therefore, here, I will paste in my question once more. Several of us 
believe that your response will directly concern the technical and 
political stability of the Internet, and therefore, all of the other 
Members of the GA.

> 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

This was not pressure, but rather the genuine need of an important 
clarification that we have failed to obtain for several months now. 
However, I must say that this clarification is becoming rather urgent 
due to all that we [the users] would have to undertake in order to 
preserve this key factor of the stability of the Internet, should 
ICANN no longer continue to carry out the task.

All the best.
jfc