[Originally submitted Monday but with my ICANN email address, so it apparently didn’t get distributed to the IETF list.] John, et al, There are a substantial number of ICANN people at this IETF meeting, including, of course, the usual IANA team, three of ICANN’s to level managers — David Conrad, Chief Technology Officer, Ashwin Rangun, Chief Innovation and Information Officer, and Akram Atallah, president of the Global Domains Division — several people on David Conrad’s team, and four people on the ICANN board, including, of course, the IETF liaison to the ICANN board, Jonne Soininen, and Suzanne Woolf, who serves multiply as the liaison to the ICANN board from the root server operators group, RSSAC, chair of DNSOP, and a member of the IAB. ICANN is paying a LOT of attention. Speaking for myself and not necessarily for the ICANN board or the rest of the organization, it seems evident that the nice clean separation of name spaces originally envisioned via the distinct indicators in DNS, e.g. “IN” for “Internet”, protocol identifiers in URLs, etc. has not worked out in practice. The original scheme of assigning just seven “generic” top level domains plus two letter country code TLDs meant the rest of the top level space was left unassigned. Nature apparently abhors a vacuum in this area as well as in the physical domain. Various vendors grabbed unused names such as local, corp, mail and built then into their products. In principle, these names should not have shown up in queries to the DNS root; in practice they have shown up in great numbers. Developers of new protocols have also felt comfortable using previously unused top level names, with onion being the example getting the most attention right now, but with several others previously used and more to come. Meanwhile, one of the goals included in ICANN’s formation was increasing competition and choice. (Don’t blame me; I wasn’t involved at the time.) The first result was the creation of the registrar system, which resulted in a dramatic drop in the price of domain names. The second result, which has taken quite a bit longer, was the opening up of the top level domain space, which brings us to where we are today. Irrespective of the original intent to keep various name spaces separate, I think we have to accept that these name spaces bleed into each other. Once we accept that, to me, fairly obvious fact of life, the next step is to work out some straightforward coordination between the IETF’s processes and ICANN’s processes. I don’t see why it should be hard or lengthy to do so. Steve David Conrad’s technical team, Akram Attalah On Jul 21, 2015, at 11:30 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
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