Re: Re[4]: [ga-roots] Jon Postel

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

I've forgotten why we're discussing this.
However, the facts are that the NSF letter
was a response to the PGMedia antitrust lawsuit,
which forced everyone's hand regarding who had
the authority to add new TLDs. 

NSI tried to pin the authority on Jon, Jon
demurred to the "Internet community consensus," 
NSF was forced to accept resposibility as the
contractor for NSI under the InterNIC cooperative
agreement.

Before that (1997), there was a great deal of ambiguity. Postel and the ARPA-Internet community created the first batch of TLDs around 1984,under
US military contracts. But there was no charging
for domain names and no commercial use of the Internet
so issues of property rights were simply not defined.
Probably the US military had the strongest claim
to ultimate root authority, but between 1991-93 
it yielded that authority (again, ambiguously) to
the civilian agencies, and once it became 
internationalized and civilianized it was difficult
for the military to assert any claim.
 
>>> "William X. Walsh" <william@userfriendly.com> 05/25/01 12:52 PM >>>
Hello Josh,

Friday, May 25, 2001, 9:38:16 AM, Josh Elliott wrote:

> Which does not mean IANA did not have the authority...it meant that NSI
> refused to recognize IANA's authority in anything other than ccTLDs.  At a
> later date, NSI refused to recognize IANA's authority for anything in the
> root without, including routine changes to nameserver information.  Was that
> due to NSF refusing to recognize IANA's authority as well?  Think
> again...that was simply a blatant refusal by NSI.

> IANA's contractual obligation which is found in a number of
> NSF/ARPA/Research contracts does not limit IANA's authority to ccTLDs or
> specifically describe its authority over gTLDs.  n other words, you nor I
> will ever be certain whether IANA had any authority other than the defacto
> support of the vast majority of the Internet community for nearly 30 years.

One would think that the NSF letter is a definitive answer to this
question, Josh.

-- 
Best regards,
William X Walsh
mailto:william@userfriendly.com
Owner, Userfriendly.com
Userfriendly.com Domains
The most advanced domain lookup tool on the net


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