[discuss] Dear ICANN - Feedback

[Jefsey]

At 04:33 15/04/2014, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 03:38:34PM +0200, JFC Morfin wrote:
> > root is to address not the "introduction in the root" but rather the
> > ***undemocratic*** allocation of TLDs to ***non-cooperative***
> > operators, i.e. why and who is to make money on the common good
> > represented by a naming category.
>
>I think that is a false dichcotomy.  Suppose that two 
>internally-co-operative organizations that do not co-operate with 
>one another[1] both want to control a domain name.  All of the 
>problems you are talking about (which might have nothing to do with 
>making money but certainly involve disputes about the common good 
>represented by a name -- I don't know what a "naming category" is) 
>are repeated in this case.

No. Because the name is only a domain name that goes to the first 
registered group. Then there might be an UDRP dispute that will be 
democratically addressed among ***registrants*** and possibly in 
courts. The MS mechanism as introduced by the NTIA fails by being 
non-democratic all the way up and down.

>We still need to make a decision about who if anyone gets to 
>register and activate the name.

The first one who matches the RFC determined democratic criteria, 
with possible opposition during the sunrise period. This is what nic.coop does.

> > wear. The idea of making money from TLDs came with ICANN because
> > ICANN needed a budget and chose to tax domain names.
>
>Just to be clear, you mean "making money from fees imposed on TLD
>operators" and not "making money from TLDs", right?

No. I mean making money from TLDs so it may be taxed by ICANN.

>Those of us who were around pre-ICANN remember then-NetworkSolutions 
>making _plenty_ of money "from TLDs", in that by having the 
>registration authority in a TLD there was lots of money to be made.

No. NSI made money from selling domain name service at a rate 
necessary to compensate for the lack of public subsidies. The 
question was to know if that money was disguised taxes or not. In the 
rest of the world, including US public operators, the registration 
fees subsidised the whole network services.

> > TLD project would then have to register and document the project as
> > being MS cooperative, for example on "http://tld.coop", on a first
> > come first serve basis. Anyone could challenge it during its sunrise
> > period.
>
>So, apart from the price of applying for a new TLD in the last round 
>(and I certainly won't defend that), what was the difference between 
>that and what you propose?

Equal footing democracy.

>The apocryphal, "Now we're just haggling about the price," comes to 
>mind, though with a much more elevating goal, I must say!
>
> > DNSA.org is, therefore, going to introduce an IETF Draft to
> > dedicate, on a test basis within the ICANN/ICP-3 framework, an "MS"
> > class to TLDs to be managed on an MS basis. Any stakeholder who
> > wants to be a co-author is welcome.
>
>If by "class" you mean "in the DNS sense, for registration in the 
>IANA protocol parameters registry", then I'd be happy to read and 
>try to help improve a draft

You are most welcome.

>once it was reasonably complete.  Any such draft will _have to_ deal 
>with the class-independent RRTYPE problem, of which CNAME is the 
>most prominent member.

This is what experimentation is to tell. My understanding of the 
internet as virtual neworking over networks of networks makes me to 
think class-independent RRTYPE are mainly a facility for the VGN 
Master (like * sub-hosts) and have no implication on the DNS 
structure itself. But this calls for a consolidation of the DNS 
documentation and probably some inputs from Mokapetris and the 
CI/RRTYPE authors.

>But I suspect it could be coped with in a somewhat hideous way 
>involving server-side processing.

I do not think so, but this is to documentation and experimentation 
to tell. IMHO this is pure missing layer six stuf.

>Whether it'd actually work at all with deployed code is an empirical 
>question.  It'd doubtless be a mess, but it might be worth 
>investigating anyway.

This is the target of the http://fs4.net set of fail-secure projects 
I will try to keep reporting there, from my (in French) home, local, 
regional, national, trade and global ICANN/ICP-3 conformant test-bed.

>Best regards,
>
>A
>
>[1] I trust this is not so unusual a situation such that it requires 
>careful redefinition of "co-operative" or "not co-operating with one 
>another", but in case it is I suggest that a few hours perusing the 
>way certain political organizations tend to fracture on points of 
>orthodoxy might be instructive.

Certainly, and the best test-beds we know in our area are FLOSS, 
IETF. But the situation is different here as the cooperation precedes 
the cooperative set-up.  Dont think of two opposing cooperative 
structures, think of an existing cooperation that is democratically 
managed. The TLD is established upon an open project definition: no 
one owns it.  Look when I supported the idea to use ISO 3166 
(actually, that day I called it the "telex list") to organize the 
international naming if fared well. My proposition today is to add 
the Nice Classification for TMs. The general idea is that digital 
stakeholders are not in the "business" to define countries, goods and services.