Geoff,
FWIW, when I first read the thing, I had much the same reaction
you did. I then took a further step, which I would encourage
you and others to do as well. The IAOC has concluded that this
trust arrangement is, on balance in the best interests of the
community. Perhaps for good reasons, they haven't been very
explicit about their reasoning and the alternatives they
evaluated and rejected, but I think it would be safe to suggest
that they concluded that this was less bad than any of the other
options.
We haven't had a discussion about whether that was the right
decision and really could not have it without much more
information than the community has gotten... and probably is
likely to get. Whether that is a good situation or not is
almost a separate question from what the agreement says. For
myself, I can both understand and sympathize with the situation
and not be very happy about it.
In particular, if the IAOC remains steadfast in the belief that
an agreement along these lines is the best possible approach (or
the least-bad one), then "go back and renegotiate this section"
could, I imagine, easily lead to another nine months or a year
of negotiations. From a different perspective, that is another
nine months or a year in which most of the claimed advantages
that persuaded the community to adopt the IASA plan are
deferred. It is interesting to speculate on whether the
community would have agreed to what became BCP 101 if we had all
understood that it would be at least two or three years
(apparently the current IAOC estimate) before the bulk of those
benefits would arrive. Making that period even longer raises
some interesting questions that are much broader than the Trust
arrangement.
My assumption is that, given a conclusion that the Trust and a
Trust Agreement was necessary, this particular provision was
essentially a non-negotiable showstopper by at least one of the
parties such that the change you suggest would be nearly
equivalent to "toss out the agreement, and maybe the Trust idea,
and start over from where we were a year ago". The IAOC is
clearly reluctant to consider that option. I can't evaluate
what fraction of that reluctance is the conviction that this
approach is clearly, based only on how it is constructed today,
the best one for the IETF and how much of it is based on an
appreciation for the length and difficulties of the negotiation
to get us here given acceptance of the Trust idea and the
problems with the alternatives.
So I would encourage you to look beyond 10.1 as a principle and
to read the agreement for things we might conceivably want to
change. That sort of reading caused 9.5, the appearance that
the Trustees would not be subject to the openness requirements
that they had when operating as the IAOC under BCP 101, the
ambiguity about what was "current" and what is "historical", and
some of the language of Schedule A about handling and rights
transfers in historical documents to jump out at me. I think
there is general agreement now that those things need to be
tuned. I appreciate the IAOC's decision to do the tuning and
only then close out the consensus call, rather than expecting
the community to sign off on the assumption that things will be
tuned in a satisfactory way.
Your reading may turn up other areas in which either the
language is wrong or some exemption from the 10.1 veto is
required. If so, I would strongly urge you to raise them, and
raise them forcefully. But, unless I misunderstand the
situation, asking that the veto provisions simply be removed is,
in essence, a request that the whole plan be thrown away and
alternatives considered. Again, whether that is a good idea or
a bad one is a separate question... but one should be careful
what one is wishing for.
best,
john
--On Friday, November 25, 2005 11:52 AM +1100 Geoff Huston
<gih@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,
I'd like to voice my concern with the provisions of Section
10.1 of the Trust, and respons to the Consensus Call with a
voice of dissent to consensus on the document as it currently
stands.
The section of the Trust document that I have some difficulty
with is section 10.1
"10.1 Amendments. Prior to July 1, 2010, this Agreement may be
amended only by unanimous written consent of both of the
...
Having had some experience with similar overriding veto
provisions within the rights of so-called "charter Members' in
the first 5 years of ISOC's history I am naturally anxious
that such situations are not repeated, as they certainly were
the cause of considerable contention within ISOC at the time
which placed ISOC itself at some risk of organizational
failure in my personal opinion.
It appears to me that one way to avoid the undue furtherance
of what could be termed historical interests in the IETF's
Trust is to reword this section to the effect that this
effective power of veto vested in CNRI and ISOC be removed.
...
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