Re: ICANN to allow commercial gTLDs

["John R. Levine" <johnl () iecc com>]

> > run by agencies of the US government, who knows what will happen in
> > the future.
>
> I'm not so sure volunteer root operators are in a position to editorialize
> and for that to have a positive effect.  ICANN could go down the
> path of stating that this causes internet stability  (due to operators
> publishing a partial root).

It is not my impression that the volunteer root operators have any great 
love for ICANN.  They have carefully avoided making any agreements with 
ICANN that oblige them to do anything other than notify ICANN if they 
think something interesting is going on.  If the USG operators said 
"sorry, the DOJ anti-trust rules don't allow us to serve a zone with 
.HONDA and .BACARDI", why would the the pressure be on them rather than on 
ICANN?  Nobody outside the ICANN bubble cares about more TLDs.

> That would then be sufficient justification to  remove root server
> operators from the root zone

How do you propose to do that?  The addresses of the roots are hard wired 
into the config of a million DNS caches around the world.  If it came to 
a fight between ICANN and the root operators, it is hard to see how ICANN 
could win.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl () iecc com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly