PAB Re: USG commerce dept vs. internet (fwd)

From: Sascha Ignjatovic (sascha@isoc.vienna.org)
Date: Sat Jan 31 1998 - 20:09:32 PST


i am sory for heavy trafic but still in topic :-)
interesting vuews are expressed there
sascha

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 31 Jan 1998 22:59:57 -0500
From: John Curran <jcurran@bbnplanet.com>
To: karl@cavebear.com
Cc: Sascha Ignjatovic <signato@email.archlab.tuwien.ac.at>,
    Thomas_A._Kalil@oa.eop.gov, ietf@ns.ietf.org
Subject: Re: USG commerce dept vs. internet

Karl,
 
   I actually agree with quite a bit of your comments below
   (and, in particular, the closing points regarding the
   supra-national nature of the Internet, the inability of
   some existing national models to cope with such, and the
   need for increased education on this aspect of the Internet).

   However, it's worth noting the Department of Commerce has
   fairly broad authority with respect to issues which effect
   ability of US folks to engage in interstate commerce. Further,
   the "Framework For Global Electronic Commerce" paper issued
   from the White House under the President's name includes a
   specific request for the Department of Commerce to study
   the DNS Governance issue.

   Given that the Green Paper is a simply a proposal at this
   time for consideration by the community, there's not much
   "authority" being exercised. From my reading, it appears
   that much of the actual execution would require explicit
   cooperation of many folks, including the IANA, the IAB,
   the regional IP registries, NSI, and parties interested in
   operating additional DNS registries. I imagine that many
   folks will provide feedback on the proposal and we'll see
   more refinement, but in the end, it's going to have to be
   the community that actually decides to adopt and execute
   any plan for moving forward.

   We, the Internet Community, have not successfully evolved the
   current IANA and DNS situation into a stable, competitive,
   and representative infrastructure. It should be no surprise
   that the US Goverment wants to see this come about and is
   providing its thinking on how to move forward; the only real
   surprise is how carefully they're trying to work with the
   community given all the options at their command.

/John

>...
>[From: "A Framework For Global Electronic Commerce"]
>
> President William J. Clinton
> Vice President Albert Gore, Jr.
> Washington, D.C.
>...
>Governance of the domain name system (DNS) raises other important issues
unrelated to intellectual property. The
>Administration supports private efforts to address Internet governance
issues including those related to domain names and has
>formed an interagency working group under the leadership of the Department
of Commerce to study DNS issues. The
>working group will review various DNS proposals, consulting with
interested private sector, consumer, professional,
>congressional and state government and international groups. The group
will consider, in light of public input, (1) what
>contribution government might make, if any, to the development of a global
competitive, market-based system to register
>Internet domain names, and (2) how best to foster bottom-up governance of
the Internet.



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