What the WSIS argument (doesn't) mean

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: John R Levine <johnl () taugh com>
Date: October 2, 2005 8:53:10 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: What the WSIS argument (doesn't) mean


[ possibly for IP, relative to Hiawatha Bray's question about whether
anyone could force the US to give up control over what ICANN is doing ]

There is a great deal of posturing going on here.

There are three real players in Internet governance.  ICANN is nominally
in charge of name and number allocation, and has been the gatekeeper of
what goes into the root DNS zone.  They're incredibly dysfunctional and
have done approximately nothing of importance, which is in practice  
fine.
ICANN exists due to a contract with the US Department of Commerce,
although they claim to be a worldwide bottom-up consensus based
organization which they demonstrate by having meetings in remote places
that cost a fortune to get to (but are fun junkets for those of us  
who get
to go.)

The DNS root servers are run by unpaid volunteers (one of them,  
Verisign,
is arguably paid but they're only one out of 12) who have accepted the
ICANN root zone, but if ICANN did something really stupid, they probably
wouldn't.  The operators are technically very sophisticated and do a  
fine
job, better than most people realize, and there are a lot more than 12
actual servers behind the 12 visible server names.

IP address space is allocated by regional IP registries, somewhat
coordinated by ICANN, but not to the extent that ICANN can give them
orders and expect the RIRs to follow them.  Despite some moaning and
groaning, the RIRs do a good job and most of the complaints are  
political,
little poor countries complaining that they can't get as much IP address
space as big rich countries, but they don't actually need any more than
they have.

ICANN has amazingly poor political skills and has made some really dumb
moves recently, most notably approving the .XXX domain which provoked  
the
US DOC, which hitherto had been happy to let ICANN stumble along on its
own, to tell them not to do that.  ICANN also approved the .CAT  
domain for
Catalan-speakers, opening a potential Pandora's box of linguistic  
minority
domains.  (.KURD, anyone?)  This reminded the rest of the world that  
ICANN
belongs to the US, which DOC and there happened to be this WSIS process
going on at the ITU anyway, so it's not surprising that other countries
took the opportunity to say bad things about US control of ICANN and the
DNS.

The reality is that commercial Internet users are happy with things the
way they are, even in countries whose governments are expressing
objections, and the loose connection among ICANN, the RIRs, and the root
operators makes it less than obvious what would happen if someone  
started
giving orders that the established players thought could have bad
consequences to the operation of the Internet.  (There's no technical
problems with .XXX or .CAT, just political ones.)  So expect to see more
smoke, but not much fire.

R's,
John



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