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

["Roberto Gaetano" <roberto@xxxxxxxxx>]

Karl Auerbach wrote:
> 
> ICANN should strive to insulate itself from the political 
> aspect of recognizing what is and what is not chunk of 
> national sovereignty.

Absolutely correct

> 
> For ICANN do to other than to follow, exactly, what is in the 
> appropriate ISO list (3166-1?) would be for ICANN to usurp 
> the authority of the ISO, causing ICANN to become embroiled 
> in the political questions of recognition or non-recognition.
> 
> Else ICANN ought to be very frank and say that it uses the 
> ISO lists merely as suggestions.

Agree completely

> 
> So if a name, even a big one, falls out of the ISO list, it 
> should vanish from the root zone file.

This is where we start to disagree. Actually, I should say, this is where I
start having doubts. Maybe somebody might not appreciate if the .uk will
disappear tomorrow, just because the code in ISO-3166 is GB. I bet that
there will be so much international pressure that IANA would only have the
choice to reintroduce it.

> 
> Countries and country codes don't vanish instantly or without 
> notice.  And as long as people who build their names in 
> ccTLDs are potentially impermanent, they can adjust their 
> actions and expectations accordingly.

The problem is the reallocation by ISO of a code that used to be something
else. Urls on the web will start pointing to different pages, emails will go
to a different addressee, and so on. I can live with broken links, but not
with links that resolve to the wrong place.

> 
> Similarly, ICANN should not try to engage in life support for 
> any TLD of any kind - otherwise ICANN would find itself even 
> more deeply sunk into the dangerous swamp of economic and 
> social engineering than it is already.

I am not convinced of this. I buy the argument that ICANN (actually IANA)
should not decide which is a country. However, to drop instantaneously what
was a country until yesterday is a different matter, that does not require
the same latitude of decision.

> 
> The only caveat to this is that there are a large number of 
> people, myself included, who live in the legacy world of the 
> days before ICANN, even before Versign, and even before 
> Network Solutions, in which we had but one choice, .com, and 
> have never had the opportunity to make a choice among a 
> variety of domain name products with diverse characteristics.

I'm not sure I understand this. Anyway, the most important disagreement is
the one above, so I'm not much worried about this one.

Regards,
Roberto