One way of reading these tea leaves is to say that ICANN hasn't been seen as truly open, truly inclusive, or truly independent. "Lapdog of the US-DoC" was one critic's description. Speaking as an early adopter of Vint's and Jon's philosophy of openness/inclusiveness/interoperability, it's really painful to see balkanization and to consider it inevitable.
Paul,
I believe you believe it. And I respect this. Let please for once forget mutual teasing. The "balkanization" you fear, we all fear, is a result of the _kind_ of openness/inclusiveness/interoperablity of this Internet thinking. I fully accept that it is painfull to you. But please understand that there is a huge difference between equal and included. Between internationalized and multilingual. Between controlling and supported. This is the whole ccNSO story.
I thing there still is a chance to avoid this balkanization. It is to jointly work on intergoverance. Of DNS, IP addressing and Spam in priority, and on financing (this is an IETF issue through a cheaper surer innovative and sustainable usage architecture).
Please understand that no one wants an "internet governance" which has shown to be an ICANN dominance and which does not match the interapplication tremendous technical opening in services and R&D. Every sovereign State and independent community fully understands what USA proposed through ICANN, and is ready to concert with it, even to acknowledge it a leading role. But no one wants to depend on it. This is the UN charter by the WSIS: to find how to do it. And this is a true and genuine response to ICANN's call to Governments.
Thechnically this means exactly what ICANN ICP-3 documents calls for. Testing towards a DNS first level management where the legacy part, (or view?) can be managed by ICANN and concerted with the different countries parts, etc. This most probably means also all the innovation which has been delayed for 20 years (ex. an acceptable SiteFinder should be supported by an RFC - while several ccTLD run it).
We have to chose between an intergoverned root matrix and a balkanized name space. ICP-3 adopts the right approach IMHO: to call on the IETF to discuss and control a serious testing of the possible solutions. ICANN published the conditions of such a testing: non-profit, to the benefit of the whole community, reversible, not affecting general operations. The work we carried since they published it, shown us that this testing, to be of interest, must include the testing of the societal, of the economical and of the intergovernantal aspects as well. It also shown the cost of such a test bed is financially dramatically low, but conceptually dramatically high to accept for some.
- We need a multilingual multinational root matrix.
- We need a geotechnological numbering plan, separating routing from addressing. IPv6.010 plan. (how could we valid a multi numbering plan system with a single plan configuration being tested).
- We need a mail architecture which will outdate spam.
We will necessarily have them decided by Tunis 2005. I would really prefer such a "Tunnet" to be a consensus rather than a "balkanet".
jfc
_______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf