On Fri, Jul 01, 2022 at 02:45:41PM +1000, George Michaelson wrote: > Before the time of incorporation, there was serious consideration of > Geneva (for example) as a place to be seen to do business. This came > up again in the ICANN formation days, and in part also goes to the > equally irrelevant decision to site both HSM for ICANN in the US, > "east and west coast for diversity" instead of locating one in any > other economy. People from non-US jurisdictions often look at > decisions taken to material benefit of the US community and ask "when > was this going to be discussed" and the answer usually is "its not > effective or efficient to put this out to consensus, especially in > politically charged times" If we consider that the founding of ISOC and ICANN happened when the OSI vs TCP/IP protocol wars were at their height, with many in the IP camp strongly beliving that OSI was a conspiracy cooked up by European bureacrats to try to foist a more inefficient, more expensive set of standards with a nefarious set of goals to reset competition to give European computer companies and telecoms a chance to compete, I suspect that any attempt to argue for ISOC/ICANN getting incorporated anywhere in Europe would have just resulted in the July 1992 "palace revolt" happening a few years sooner. :-) (For those don't remember, the 1992 Palace Revolt was after the IAB advanced a discussion paper proposing the adoption of OSI's CLNP as a replacement for IP to solve the address space exhaustion problem.) I'm not saying that those beliefs by the IP camp were correct; in fact, some of them were quite unfair. However, for those people who didn't live through that era, suffice it to say, that asking many IETF engineers of that era to trust just about *any* European entity with Internet standards would be met with about the same amount of outrage as asking many engineers of today to trust the NSA regarding, say, whether the Speck cipher or Dual-EC DRBG should be considered secure and without a back door. - Ted
