David,
Two minor points of calibration. I've got (strong) opinions
about some of this, but am going to try to write this note as
neutrally as possible, just explaining where things stand.
--On Friday, 30 September, 2005 14:34 -0700 Dave Singer
<singer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>...
> a) Design of the protocols and specifications; the IETF does
> that, and I don't think anyone is thinking of taking that
> away. So "The UN is taking on the IETF's job" is a
> non-suggestion non-starter.
Without getting into a discussion of how legitimate the claims
are or how likely any decisions that might be made would mean
anything, there are definitely forces within the WSIS process
that believe that the IETF has outlived its usefulness, that the
development of Internet protocols and technical standards has
become too important to be left to a bunch of undisciplined
volunteer engineers (that is pretty close to a quote) and needs
to be turned over to a body in which decision-making rests with
governments, etc. That body would presumably, but not
necessarily, be the ITU which is part of the UN system.
>...
> I, for one, would be much happier in a world
> where I know who has the authority to decide whether you
> really are a company with that name -- with the answer being,
> the authorities in the identified area. So, adding
> non-geographic TLDs to my mind, is a mistake; I'd prefer
> fewer of them. Deprecate ".com" in favor of ".co.us" (or
> ".co.hm" or wherever else you want to be). And if Tuvalu
> wants to continue to sell its name to first-come-first-served,
> it may; I will soon learn to give ".tv" names the same (low)
> level of trust I give ".com".
>
> If this were the agreement, the question of who operates the
> root DNSs, routers, and the like would be almost as
> uncontroversial as to who designs the protocols, in my opinion.
Ultimately someone has to operate the keyboard that puts lines/
records into what ultimately becomes the root zone file. And
someone has to supervise that person/ entity. When someone comes
along and says (to use your example), "the nameservers for .hm
should be X, Y, and Z", a determination has to be made as to
whether that request is legitimate and authorized wrt either the
current administration of .HM or the government responsible for
Heard Island and the McDonald Islands. Note that statement
about legitimacy and authority actually involves several choices
which might need to be made.
Now, for better or worse, that evaluation process, particularly
for ccTLDs, has been the source of an immense amount of
controversy. Those who get most excited about the status quo
don't acknowledge that ICANN is a legitimate, international,
multi-stakeholder, private-sector organization but, instead,
refer to it simply as "the US Government Contractor". They
point out that the US Government has asserted responsibility
for, and control of, the root zone and that it clearly has the
ability to overrule ICANN in determinations about root zone
entries. They then proceed to say that the determinations as to
the legitimacy of requests to change the records for a given
ccTLD should not be in the hands of any one country, and say it
in a way that makes it very clear that the statement implies
"especially a country they don't like, don't trust, and which
has a reputation for throwing its weight around".
So that situation is, in practice, anything but uncontroversial.
john
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