[registrars] Rick's Position statement for Technical Officer position

[Rick H Wesson <wessorh@ar.com>]

Hello All:

I've been nominated for the position as Technical Officer in the Registrar
constituency of ICANN. I'd like to take this opportunity to provide some
background information about myself.

I am the CEO of Alice's Registry an ICANN accredited and operational
Registrar. I've been involved in the DNS industry since the beginning of
the effort to add additional gTLDs to the root. It started in 1996 while
running an e-mail list called NEWDOM where we discussed with the IANA
about how to add some new TLDs to the root. Since that time I've been
involved with the IAHC, CORE the PAB and all the attempts before the
green/white papers came out of the Clinton Administration.

Once the ICANN effort started, I participated in many of the DNSO meetings
and continue to do so. I attend about 3 ICANN meetings a year. When the
first ICANN testbed was established in 1999 I worked in Germany for CORE
to assist them with the development of their systems. I worked with NSI
and the testbed registrars on many issues including SSL connectivity to
the registry and other technical issues. I was more concerned with the
overall success of the testbed rather than if I was assisting the
competition.

Over the years I have written many WHOIS and RRP servers and gateways for
many of the operational registrars. I continue to develop software for
RRP, EPP, WHOIS, and Internationalized domains - as one of 5 IDN
Technology providers, to better understand the technical issues that a
registrar faces during day to day operations.

I am a active member of the IETF and my involvement in the IETF goes back
to 1996 where I presented on a concept called the Shared Registry System
(SRS) at the BOF I chaired called NEWDOM. I also chaired another BOF in
1997 called CORE-DATA, this was before the ICANN effort. In CORE-DATA we
attempted and failed to define a protocol to do thick and thin
Registry-Registrar protocol.

Today I am active in the prov-reg working group and part of the EPP
protocol design team. I also am active in the IDN working group and served
on their ACE design team. I attend 2 to 3 IETF meeting per year. I have
worked allot on WHOIS and similar technologies, I have an Internet-Draft
that describes a export format in XML for WHOIS data. I served on the
ICANN Escrow committee and consulted with the ICANN WHOIS Committee. I
also assisted in the negotiation of the VeriSign Service Level Agreement
on behalf of the Registrars. I continue to be an active developer in EPP
and am one of the listed developers on the TuCows/Liberty epp-rtk project
that is on openly hosted at http://epp-rtk.sourceforge.net I have worked
with allot of the new registries on EPP and continue to consult to
registrars on technology issues.

I write code, allot of code, and 99% of the time it has something to do
with a critical part of your business. If elected to the Technical Officer
position I will continue to make my frank opinions on technology and
policy available for the benefit of the entire registrar community.

thanks,

-rick