Hello Harold,
Given the packed agenda already for the 20th I suggest we defer this discussion
until the meeting in Rio.
I think we should encourage a meeting between GNSO council and ICANN Staff (and/or Board
members) in Rio to get some clarification on your question. To me it is an important
process question as to what does ICANN do with any advice from IAB or the Security and
Advisory Committee. Ideally I would have thought under the new ICANN processes that the
Board might as a result raise an "Issue paper" via the ICANN staff as a result
of such advice and get some input from the relevant council (which may be RIR and GNSO).
So I recommend placing on the agenda for the meeting in Rio.
Regards,
Bruce
-----Original Message-----
From: Harold J. Feld [mailto:hfeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 9:46 AM
To: Names Council (E-mail)
Cc: Alejandro Pisanty; Vint Cerf; Louis Touton; M. Stuart Lynn
Subject: [council] IAB Statement on IDN
Bruce and fellow Council members:
I have, as yet, received no response to email of last week asking for
clarification on how ICANN will proceed on the IAB statement
regarding
Verisign's IDN proposal (copied below). I should therefore like to
request that the matter be placed on the agenda for the 20th.
I wish to stress that I have no wish to debate the merits of the IAB
statement and that, I believe, ICANN has acted entirely properly and
within its mandate in consulting the IAB on a technical matter that
pertains to the stability of the Internet. What I would ask us to
discuss, and invite resolution from the ICANN Board, is what happens
_next._ The IAB statement was in that middle ground where
conflicting
assesments of risk and guiding policy are most conflicted and where a
clear standard on regulation is desperately needed. It will
not serve
users for Verisign to wodely deploy, only to be required to shut down
its IDN system becuase it induces instability in the DNS. At
the same
time, some risk must be tolerable or we devolve to total
statis, which
is anathema to the dynamic nature of the Internet.
Harold Feld
_______________________________________________
Stuart, Vint and Louis (I have cc:ed the Names Council list,
as I expect
this to be a matter of some interest):
I am writing to ask what follows from yesterday's IAB Response to
questions about Verisign's IDN efforts.
Let me begin by stressing that it was absolutely proper for
the BoD to
consult the IAB. This is an issue of technical stability and
interoperability which lies at the heart of ICANN's purview.
And, if it
appeared that Verisign's IDN project would cause the DNS to crash and
burn then action under either the Cooperative Agreement or Verisign's
registry contract would certainly have been appropriate.
That said, it appears that the IAB did not reach that
conclusion. As a
lay person, I am not entirely sure what the IAB precisely did
say. They
clearly had some issues with Verisign's IDN, and in
particular appeared
to favor a uniform approach among gTLDs arrived at via the
traditional
IETF standards.
We now come to the perilous intersection of technical stability and
policy. It appears that Verisign's IDN does not create a
crisis. But
the IAB has issues. How do we (ICANN) proceed?
There is, of course, a straightforward legal question which lies in
Louis' baliwick. What is ICANN legally required to do, and
what is it
empowered to do? But there is a broader question of what
ICANN _should_
do. Arguably, having determined that no crisis exists, ICANN should
leave well enough alone. Alternatively, if the IAB assesment
indicates
that there is a potential for real disaster, some prophylactic steps
might be justified. At the very least, further discussion is
warranted
and some means of monitoring so as to avert a crisis before it occurs
would seem desirable.
But if the crux of the IAB objection is that Verisign has
moved forward
without the blessing of the IETF, or that there is some potential for
consumer confusion, or that all IDN should be standardized
for reasons
other than interoperability, then, it seems to me, a very different
approach is warranted.
As I have said before, I am very leary of ICANN becoming an industry
regulatory body. I have some experience of both public utility
regulation and media regulation in the United States. They are not
pretty, but such intrusive regulation is sometimes necessary.
But the
entire purpose of ICANN is to spare the Internet from such a
need. While
some have proposed treating gTLD registries as public utilities or
public assets, this has never been sanctioned as ICANN's mandate.
Rather, ICANN exists to maintain sufficient stability to
allow the DNS
to both function and continue to evolve.
I would therefore personally urge a course that permits the greatest
autonomy for gTLDs consistent with basic principles of
interoperability,
technical stability, and fairness to all registries. Verisign should
not, of course, enjoy a greater freedom to innovate than
other TLDs. But
innovation in registry-level services is, it seems to me, a positive
good. Indeed, one of the criteria in the .org re-delegation
was whether
the new registry proposed innovative services.
In particular, I hope that nothing is done which would appear to make
conformance to IETF standards mandatory, or which would limit
innovation
until the IETF has formalized a standard or process. The great
strength of the IETF (again, from an outsider's perspective) has been
its voluntary nature. "Rough consensus and running code" has
fostered
considerable innovation precisely because it imposed no orthodoxy.
Anyone with a different approach to a problem was free to try it, and
this competition of ideas has served the Internet exceedingly well.
While enough of us rely on the DNS that experimentation cannot be
allowed to place the Internet at-large at risk, I believe the
Internet
-- and the IETF and IAB -- would be disserved by making IETF
standards
mandatory.
I wish I had a definite suggestion to offer on how to proceed, but I
don't. I can only say that ICANN has behaved prudently so far, and I
hope it will continue to do so. But we must not equate prudence with
stasis, nor equate caution with the elimination of all risk.
Harold Feld
GNSO Rep.
NCC