Re: PAB EuroISPA reply to USG green paper

From: Jim Dixon (jdd@vbc.net)
Date: Mon Feb 16 1998 - 12:32:53 PST


On Tue, 10 Feb 1998, Sascha Ignjatovic wrote:

> in my point if vuew we should not "byte the hand wich feeds us"
> i mean that dr.postel and the "old guard"+"international volunteers" are
> the GARANTEES that the internet is not faling until now in the hands
> of not comepetent persons and i am shure that would find
> also in the future the way to do so
>
> i would sugest and suport a strong position for dr.postel in any iana
> configuration becouse he is the garantee that the internet would
> be a international system and not national property

Any description of a successor institution to IANA should not be
based upon the continuing presence of any individual.

Jon Postel and IANA appear to have done very well at handling IANA's
technical functions: editing RFCs, handling assigned numbers,
allocation of the IP address, and management of certain aspects of
the DNS. IANA has failed at its attempts to handle gTLDs. Why do I
say this? Because no names have been delegated and the green paper
has been published.

That is, we don't have "rough consensus and running code". What
we have is a profound split and nothing running at all.

I think that the reasons for this failure are reasonably obvious:
IANA's technical strengths succeed in the world of the IETF but
aren't suitable for the rough and tumble of the commercial and
political world.

So we can either try to stretch IANA and Postel until they break
or we can recognize that they have limits and reconstruct things
so that IANA remains a center of excellence, not a war zone.

If IANA's role with respect to gTLDs is simply to set strict technical
standards and insure that any gTLDs added to the root comply with
those strict standards we can be reasonably sure that IANA pretty
much in its current form can handle this exceedingly well. IANA does
not need a board of lawyers and a tough CEO to do this; they would
not help at all. IANA run by Jon Postel can do the job.

The gTLD management function should be passed over to a body with
lots of commercial and legal expertise on tap. I see this as the
POC strengthened along the lines suggested in the Green Paper.

> he is the man runing the root server where the international root servers
> are pointing to and not to the nsi servers
>
> do you apreciate this ?

In many of its aspects, yes.

--
Jim Dixon                  VBCnet GB Ltd           http://www.vbc.net
tel +44 117 929 1316                             fax +44 117 927 2015



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