At 09:09 AM 2/6/98 -0800, Kent Crispin wrote:
>Some govenment regulatory body, of course, will be called for very
>soon. :-( Either that, or the New IANA will have to be prepared to
>deal with very expensive lawsuits...
The Green Paper basis for claiming legal protection of IANA is to class it
as a standards body. My guess is that this is a reasonable, but not
certain, view. Standards bodies do have a position within case law, so
there are guidelines for setting up and running them in a way which
withstands legal challenge. And those guidelines are all reasonable. My
own belief is that the existing gTLD MoU work is acceptable under such
guidelines, or close to it. IANA, on the other hand, is not. It needs
formal documents and procedures and IANA has been pursuing that for some
months now.
An important difference between almost all standards bodies and the IANA is
that standards groups are not directly responsible for a service and IANA
is. Further, one could argue that everyone is subject to the IANA
decisions whereas almost all standards bodies have an optional quality to
them. The "market" chooses whether to adhere to a standard, as the OSI
world learned rather dramatically.
And here, I think, is a point that needs to be emphasized. It has been
said many times before, but not really for this purpose: The IANA DNS is a
voluntary system. It succeeds because the root operators choose to adhere
to IANA directives and ISP operators choose to point to this one set of
roots. As such, the model of "standards body" well might fit perfectly,
since it pertains to dominance through public/market/user choice.
d/
--------------------
Dave Crocker +1 408 246 8253
Brandenburg Consulting fax: +1 408 249 6205
675 Spruce Dr. dcrocker@brandenburg.com
Sunnyvale, CA 94086 USA http://www.brandenburg.com
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