RE: [wg-b] Re: [wg-c] telephone numbers in domain names.

["Judith Oppenheimer" <joppenheimer@icbtollfree.com>]

There are obvious benefits of keeping ENUM out of ICANN's clutches, but

(a) the IETF ENUM working group's leadership contains people from Verisign
and NeuStar and others no doubt too, who are or will be competing with
Pulver/NetNumber for commercial supremacy in the ENUM marketplace:  note
ENUM's rush to strike a deal with the ITU, literally just weeks ago,
questioned by some ENUM followers,

and (b), that rosy ITU path is not without thorns ... for example,
"1.e164.arpa" represents an area that's actually shared between several
North American countries; even within the US, the delegation to the ITU is
managed by the State Department while the regulation of telephony is
managed by the FCC.

(At the area code level its no better.  Who has authority over
"2.1.2.1.e164.arpa"? Is this the New York State public utilities
commission, Verizon, or a third party?  Still further, a potential use of
ENUM is to bypass the local carrier, for example to send documents as
e-mail instead of faxes; this means, potentially, a loss of revenues.  So
while the users of phone numbers have an interest in listing their numbers,
the phone companies are conflicted.)

Bottom line:  the IAB/IETF/ITU alliance against Pulver/NetNumber's .TEL is
business, not altruism.

Judith

Judith Oppenheimer, 212 684-7210, 1 800 The Expert
Publisher, http://www.ICBTollFreeNews.com
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-wg-b@dnso.org [mailto:owner-wg-b@dnso.org]On Behalf Of
> Harald Alvestrand
> Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2000 12:17 PM
> To: Robert F. Connelly; wg-c@dnso.org
> Cc: NSI Registrars Mailing List; registrars@dnso.org; wg-c@dnso.org;
> wg-b@dnso.org
> Subject: [wg-b] Re: [wg-c] telephone numbers in domain names.
>
>
> At 11:39 21/11/2000 +0900, Robert F. Connelly wrote:
> >Dear Colleagues:
> >
> >I was really surprised when ICANN rejected every application
> that sounded
> >like it could be a phone number.
>
> I think pulver.com regarded the application for ".tel" as a
> cheap publicity
> stunt. Their system is already running under e164.com, and
> there is no
> technical reason whatsoever to put it closer to the root.
>
>               Harald
>
> --
> Harald Tveit Alvestrand, alvestrand@cisco.com
> +47 41 44 29 94
> Personal email: Harald@Alvestrand.no
>