IP: more on Gilmore: ICANN Must Go (good insights)

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Carl Malamud <carl () media org>
Organization: Internet Multicasting Service, Inc.
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 06:49:08 -0700 (PDT)
To: farber () cis upenn edu
Subject: Re: IP: a comment on  Gilmore: ICANN Must Go (good insights)

Hi Dave -

I liked John Gilmore's piece in Salon.  As always, full of insight.
Something I find very frustrating, however, is the current focus on
long-term goals with no short-term steps to move us towards those goals.
I agree 100% with John that thousands of TLDs is a worthy goal to move
towards.  But, with any standard, you always need a reference implementation
and today the so-called registry industry is a small oligarchy of commercial
operators cloaked in a lot of MIS-style mystique.

There is an opportunity to change that.  As you know, since you're on our
board of directors, Internet Multicasting Service and Internet Software
Consortium, both nonprofit, public benefit corporations, have submitted a
joint bid to run the .org registry.  We want to see a registry that is
totally open and transparent, including publication of freely available
software to run a registry.  IMHO, this is a necessary first step towards
moving towards thousands of TLDs.

ICANN has a very clear choice before it: keeping the current system of a
few commercial registries or promoting competition and an open system.
I hope that as people examine the long-term choices for ICANN, they also
pay attention to an important short-term decision coming up.

Here's some links for more information:

Our proposal is at: http://trusted.resource.org/
Our show-your-support page is at:
http://not.invisible.net/signals/bin/000055.shtml
NY Times, /., etc... coverage is at:
http://not.invisible.net/signals/memes/org.shtml
The ICANN bid process is at: http://www.icann.org/tlds/org/

Regards,

Carl


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