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Re: Update: IETF Trust Consensus Call

2005-11-26 02:55:23
Geoff,

FWIW, when I first read the thing, I had much the same reaction you did. I then took a further step, which I would encourage you and others to do as well. The IAOC has concluded that this trust arrangement is, on balance in the best interests of the community. Perhaps for good reasons, they haven't been very explicit about their reasoning and the alternatives they evaluated and rejected, but I think it would be safe to suggest that they concluded that this was less bad than any of the other options.

We haven't had a discussion about whether that was the right decision and really could not have it without much more information than the community has gotten... and probably is likely to get. Whether that is a good situation or not is almost a separate question from what the agreement says. For myself, I can both understand and sympathize with the situation and not be very happy about it.

In particular, if the IAOC remains steadfast in the belief that an agreement along these lines is the best possible approach (or the least-bad one), then "go back and renegotiate this section" could, I imagine, easily lead to another nine months or a year of negotiations. From a different perspective, that is another nine months or a year in which most of the claimed advantages that persuaded the community to adopt the IASA plan are deferred. It is interesting to speculate on whether the community would have agreed to what became BCP 101 if we had all understood that it would be at least two or three years (apparently the current IAOC estimate) before the bulk of those benefits would arrive. Making that period even longer raises some interesting questions that are much broader than the Trust arrangement.

My assumption is that, given a conclusion that the Trust and a Trust Agreement was necessary, this particular provision was essentially a non-negotiable showstopper by at least one of the parties such that the change you suggest would be nearly equivalent to "toss out the agreement, and maybe the Trust idea, and start over from where we were a year ago". The IAOC is clearly reluctant to consider that option. I can't evaluate what fraction of that reluctance is the conviction that this approach is clearly, based only on how it is constructed today, the best one for the IETF and how much of it is based on an appreciation for the length and difficulties of the negotiation to get us here given acceptance of the Trust idea and the problems with the alternatives.

So I would encourage you to look beyond 10.1 as a principle and to read the agreement for things we might conceivably want to change. That sort of reading caused 9.5, the appearance that the Trustees would not be subject to the openness requirements that they had when operating as the IAOC under BCP 101, the ambiguity about what was "current" and what is "historical", and some of the language of Schedule A about handling and rights transfers in historical documents to jump out at me. I think there is general agreement now that those things need to be tuned. I appreciate the IAOC's decision to do the tuning and only then close out the consensus call, rather than expecting the community to sign off on the assumption that things will be tuned in a satisfactory way.

Your reading may turn up other areas in which either the language is wrong or some exemption from the 10.1 veto is required. If so, I would strongly urge you to raise them, and raise them forcefully. But, unless I misunderstand the situation, asking that the veto provisions simply be removed is, in essence, a request that the whole plan be thrown away and alternatives considered. Again, whether that is a good idea or a bad one is a separate question... but one should be careful what one is wishing for.

best,
  john



--On Friday, November 25, 2005 11:52 AM +1100 Geoff Huston <gih(_at_)apnic(_dot_)net> wrote:

Hi,

I'd like to voice my concern with the provisions of Section
10.1 of the Trust, and respons to the Consensus Call with a
voice of dissent to consensus on the document as it currently
stands.

The section of the Trust document that I have some difficulty
with is section 10.1

"10.1 Amendments. Prior to July 1, 2010, this Agreement may be
amended only by unanimous written consent of both of the
...
Having had some experience with similar overriding veto
provisions within the rights of so-called "charter Members' in
the first 5 years of ISOC's history I am naturally anxious
that such situations are not repeated, as they certainly were
the cause of considerable contention within ISOC at the time
which placed ISOC itself at some risk of organizational
failure in my personal opinion.

It appears to me that one way to avoid the undue furtherance
of what could be termed historical interests in the IETF's
Trust is to reword this section to the effect that this
effective power of veto vested in CNRI and ISOC be removed.
...


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