Re: [ga] RE: Sponsorship of IGF Workshops
Roberto Gaetano wrote: But unfortunately the IGF itself is going out of its charter and discussing alternate ways to dela with "critical resources", which is intended to be domain names and addresses. And this subject is exactly the charter of ICANN, so I believe that it is necessary that ICANN participates to the debate. Hmmm. I understood the IGF phrase to mean exactly what the words mean, that it is going to deal with internet resources that are critical to the stable operation of the internet. Now, I interpret that phrase as being technical resources that affect technical criticality. As such, in the world of DNS the phrase "critical resources" would mean those things that have a direct relationship to the process of quickly, efficiently, and accurately transforming DNS query packets at the upper tier of DNS into DNS reply packets without prejudice for or against any query source or query subject. And in the world of IP addresses I would think "critical resources" are the allocation of IPv* addresses. And in the world of packet routing such resources are ASN's and routing information. I have suggested that a further matter would be the ability of users (or their agents, ISPs) to obtain end-to-end assurances (not guarantees) of service quality needed to support given applications (most notably VoIP). ICANN engages on none of these. In DNS, ICANN regulates business practices, and has left the all-important issue of technical oversight of root server obligations and service levels entirely untouched. In IP addresses, ICANN has abandoned its authority to the RIRs and retained a mere shadow that amounts to the empty policy of "when a RIR asks, IANA grants". ICANN does nothing with routing. So I would suggest that ICANN is not engaged in anything that can be construed as an internet "critical resource" but is, instead, engaged in tertiary matters, business practices, which do not rise anywhere near the level of being considered "critical" - were domain registration business practices to wobble there would be virtually no affect on the ongoing operation of DNS measured in terms of the transformation of DNS query packets into DNS response packets. Critical resources are to the internet as is flight operations, maintenance, and airworthiness to safe air travel. Just as the way that airlines chose to sell (or not) tickets using agents has nothing to do with safe air travel, ICANN's whole body of regulation about how domain names are sold has nothing to do with critical internet resources. In other words, ICANN doesn't have any reason to spend our money to send people to the IGF. --karl--
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