---------- 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.