Re: [council] Alternate Roots: A discussion paper

["Milton Mueller" <Mueller@syr.edu>]

Grant:
Thanks for a first pass at a complex issue. I have prepared another 
document that I will pass along to the list in my next message.

My approach is more objective and less prescriptive.  It is my belief that 
we need to explore and define issues first, and come to conclusions, later. 
That is why we need a working group and a careful and extended
consideration of the issues. 

People who think they know the answer to this conundrum now, or 
who deny that it is a complex issue, probably don't have a good 
grasp of the technical and economic dimensions of the problem.

The most significant issue is simply to define what we mean by an
"alternate" or "competing" root. The answer is not obvious. Anyone
who thinks it is, probably doesn't understand DNS very well.

Unfortunately, I view Grant's paper as a re-statement
of the old and increasingly discredited view that ICANN administers the 
"one true root" and can ignore all other name spaces. 
That whole framework rather obviously breaks down as soon as technical 
innovations are introduced. It is particularly obvious in two cases: 
New.net, and internationalized domain names. 

Your analysis of the "New.net problem" is full of holes. 
Let me briefly indicate the problems here, and take them up in more
detail in dialogue as needed.

FIRST: Let's begin with the fact that everyone OUTSIDE  of ICANN 
realizes, but no one inside wants to face or admit: 

New.net happened because ICANN's approach to adding TLDs is
too SLOW and too RESTRICTIVE. ICANN's artificial scarcity created a
market, and businesses are responding to it. The free market is giving
us  a valuable signal: current policies are way out of line with what
consumers in the marketplace want. ICANN ignores this at its peril.

SECOND: your analogy to the telephone system is incorrect.
Most national telephone systems in the world started with their own, 
uncoordinated number spaces. The ITU did not coordinate them
until very late in the game. The coordination took place by adding
a level of hierarchy (country codes) to each system. I would suggest
that this process was very much like processes that might be used to 
coordinate alternate root systems.

THIRD, I don't like what I see here:

> In my view, the issue with new.net is not that they are 
>creating sub-domains that are similar to gTLDs.  They should be free to 
>do so, just as ccTLDs should be free to do so.  The problem is that it 
>appears that new.net is misrepresenting how these domains eg, 
>www.your.biz.new.net, are going to be able to be promoted eg. as
> www.your.biz and then working with ISPs (anyone else?) to have them 
>conspire with new.net to support this misrepresentation by way of 
>corrupting the unique resolution of truncated - hence not unique - 
>names. 

This is just wrong. You can't call ISPs utilizing New.net's altered DNS
capabilities a "conspiracy" unless you are consistent and also 
call ISPs' willingness to point to the ICANN root a "conspiracy."

In both cases we are dealing with voluntary business relationships and
technical configurations among Internet service providers. 

ICANN has no international legal authority to order anyone to point
to its root, and no national government has given it any exclusive
right to call itself the DNS root. ISPs point to the ICANN root because
everyone else does. But if enough ISPs chose to set up an alternate
DNS root tomorrow, they could do so and, I argue, SHOULD  be able
to do so.

The real issue we ought to be considering is this:

1. How can ICANN's process be made more responsive to real 
market forces? Responsiveness does not mean "industry self-regulation," 
where a few insiders with a dominant position in the market cartelize
the name space and award each other a limited number of TLDs. 
I mean true responsiveness to the demands of all consumers and
suppliers operating in the market.

2. Alternate and competing roots exist. How can policies be defined
to minimize problems and to make them compatible? 

3. Above all, let's stop the posturing: ICANN and the US Dept of 
Commerce root are not divinely ordained, competition is a fact of the 
marketplace, so let's stop viewing competitors as illegitimate or as 
something that will go away.