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RE: Beyond reproach, accountability and regulation

2009-04-30 09:36:15


--On Thursday, April 30, 2009 00:22 -0700 Bernard Aboba
<bernard_aboba(_at_)hotmail(_dot_)com> wrote:

ICANN might not be the right place to discuss issues such as
I18N, but IETF is worse. 

ICANN is not by its nature a standards body so that it's not
naturally well suited to discussion of standards issues, nor
would it appear that it has any aspirations in that regard.
Given that, I'm not sure what if any role ICANN could play in
enhancing progress in DNS-related standards, other than
perhaps providing some operational feedback.  

I would add that, for better or worse, IETF is somewhat harder
to capture and somewhat less prone to influence by narrowly
focused commercial and/or political interests in this area than
ICANN.  The vast majority of ICANN participants have tended to
focus on "names" and "name markets", rather than on identifiers
and have often been somewhat unwilling to engage on actual DNS
operational and technical issues and constraints.  (Whether
"somewhat" in those sentences should be replaced by a word like
"immensely" is not, IMO, a useful debate here.)

Remember that, if one were strictly a marketer of names and
indifferent to the usability of the Internet, confusion is one's
friend -- it is a tool for selling more names and, more
generally, has already been a key ingredient in the generation
of FUD.

And worst of all would
be to have a situation where IETF is defacto ratifying
decisions that are actually being deliberated in ICANN
process.

So far, I  haven't seen much evidence of that. 

I'm reasonably close to what is going on and, while I've seen
evidence of pressure on IETF due to the timing of ICANN
processes --far more of that in 2002-2003 than now-- I've seen
no evidence at all of such de facto ratification or even of
serious attempts to make it happen.

    john

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