--On Friday, May 17, 2013 18:54 +0300 Randy Bush <randy(_at_)psg(_dot_)com>
wrote:
To be abundantly clear, you are hypothesizing a difference of
opinion between the IETF/IESG and the ICANN/RIR communities,
wherein the technical guidance of the IETF was considered
during the ICANN/RIR decision process, but in the end the
outcome was contrary to IETF expectations.
if you s/expectations/preference/ then there is a growing
track record. try the new greed top level domains (gtlds) for
starters.
I've been trying to stay out of this thread, but let me take
that a little further. I believe that IETF "preferences" are
largely based on the overall welfare of the Internet as a
complete system. I also believe that the understanding of that
system among IETF participants as a group is generally pretty
good. Certainly we fail sometimes; IMO, much more often that
I'd like. But there still seems to be rather general agreement
about success criteria and those criteria, to quote Harald's
comment of some years ago, involve making the Internet work
better.
In addition, actual capture of the IETF consensus process is
really hard. WGs can sometimes be captured by specific
interests and the IESG decision processes are sometimes not
ideal, but capture is hard. As several recent threads on the
IETF list illustrate, large portions of the community are
passionate about how decisions are made, express themselves
vigorously, and are usually listened to enough to affect actions
when that is appropriate.
As far as I can tell, large parts of the ICANN community and its
decision processes (I'm not going to comment on the RIRs because
I don't have nearly enough recent exposure) don't subscribe to
those same criteria. Their most-cited criteria are
competitiveness. "Security and stability" are chanted as a
mantra, but, empirically, that chant is about the avoidance of
major, scandalous, problems that can be directly attributed to
ICANN decisions rather than about making things better. And the
price of entry and effective participation has gradually evolved
(or been captured) in a way that biases issue consideration and
decision making toward the wishes of a narrow range of
commercial interests with short-term profitability goals plus a
few symbolic "public" or "civil" "constituencies" whose ability
to be effective is constrained by the desire to continue to
participate and feed at the ICANN trough (the phrase "enjoy fine
lunches and dinners at the expense of others" may be applicable
here). Those processes seem to be self-reinforcing and
self-reproducing enough, and driven in practice by a narrow
enough range of interests, to meet almost any criterion for a
"captured" label.
The level of harmony and conformance between ICANN's stated
principles and core values (as reflected in its bylaws,
reference [ICANNBL] in the draft) and ICANN's actual influences
and operational and decision-making practices would seem to lie
far outside the scope of this document. I think the document
reflects a certain naivety about the range of differences
between theory and practice, but I'd not convinced that is
harmful beyond some risks of making the authors look silly in
some conceivable future scenarios.
If the "technical guidance of the IETF" were really based on the
best interests of a better Internet and then used as input to a
process that doesn't consider that a particularly useful
criterion, then an outcome that is contrary to that advice is
nearly inevitable unless the advice coincidentally matches the
criteria that are actually being used. What should be done
about that is a different and, sadly complex matter (especially
given the risks of significant collateral damage that could harm
the Internet).
But it doesn't seem to me that is the present issue. For the
present document, if it accurately describes the current
situation and how things have evolved since 2050, then it is
worth publishing. If we don't like how things work, it seems to
me that changing that is part of a different effort and that a
good current description is a necessary starting point.
I, however, do have one significant objection to the current
draft of the document and do not believe it should be published
(at least as an RFC in the IETF Stream) until the problem is
remedied. The Introduction (Section 1) contains the sentence
"Since the publication of RFC 2050, the Internet Numbers
Registry System has changed significantly." That sentence is
expanded upon in Section 6, which bears the interesting title of
"Summary of Changes Since RFC 2050". But Section 6 contains no
such summary, merely a statement that things have changed and
that some material -- unidentified except by the broadest of
categories -- has been omitted.
I do not believe this document is complete enough to publish as
an RFC in the IETF Stream without a real summary of the changes
since 2050, preferably with either explanations of each
significant change or references to the documents or discussions
that instituted or explained those changes.
best,
john