RE: [ga] This should settle it.

["William X. Walsh" <william@userfriendly.com>]

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On 31-Mar-2000 Christopher Ambler wrote:
> First, you're wrong. Read it again. It says that IANA had the
> authority.

Yes, by referencing RFC's that have no weight of law, and were written at the
behest, control, or direction of IANA itself, who cannot give itself the
authority.  
 
> Second, if you don't know who George Strawn is, then you really
> don't know your history on this.

Chris, unlike you, I do not work for or own stock in a company which has a
direct financial or other stake in this process where I would know the name of
each and every person who has been involved in this.  However, I do have a good
working knowledge from the years on these forums of the basis behind most of
these issues.  Where I haven't I have made it clear, and asked for
documentation to back up what you have tried to claim.   If what you say is
true, finding documentation, and answering questions about the people who you
are quoting and the authority they may or may not have, should not be so
difficult for you to do.  That you get so defensive over it when asked a direct
and honest question to cite the authority of the person you quote, I only have
to question if there is a reason you didn't just answer the question.

So since you were willing to provide a polite answer to the question, I checked
it out on my own, and discovered that the person quoted was a participant in
the IAHC process, and a member (and co-chair) of the Federal Networking
Council.  While I could not find anything that indicates that he has any
authority to give an official opinion on the issue, I did note that a statement
on the main page specifically seperates the FNC and the USGovt. with the role
Mr Strawn played in the IAHC process.   It looks like his positions were not
necessarily in line with the positions of the official bodies who actually DO
have the authority, and they seperated themselves from actions he took outside
the scope of his role.  As an IAHC participant, a high profile one at that, it
was most certainly his opinion, as it was the rest of them, that IANA had this
authority.  But his testimony is certainly not authoritative on the issue.
 
> I've made my point.

No, you haven't Chris,  you really haven't.  And all I can say is that I really
hope your company is more prepared for asking these questions in court.  The
best defense CORE can take is to just admit that IANA didn't have the
authority, and use the lack of authority of IANA to totally defeat and any all
claims IOD might make or imagine they have to a top level domain.

You've made the point that you are not intereted in providing documentation in
the full context in which it exists, and instead to take bits and pieces of it,
quote it out of context where it appears to support your position, take
unofficial and non-binding documents and assert their official status and use
them to support your supposition, and otherwise ignore clear and compelling
evidence that shows the opposite. 

The bottom line is that if IANA had the authority, why did it fail to get the
IAHC domains included when it sought that?  The best test of the authority
issue is when they actually tried to assert the authority and do something with
it.  IANA failed that very important test, and no documentation you have
provided shows the authority existed otherwise.


- --
William X. Walsh <william@userfriendly.com>
http://userfriendly.com/
GPG/PGP Key at http://userfriendly.com/wwalsh.gpg
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