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Re: [wg-c] Eureka?

Ross,

    States.  A productive step forward here is to stop trying to
    force your views down on the world and construct arrangements
    that allow for this diversity.

    Do you have any concrete suggestions as to what would constitute such
as construct?

You need at least two regimes to concurrently exist -
as they have long existed in similar arenas.

In the telecom world - for about 100 years - there was
the ITU-PTT public resource regime, and the US private
resource regime.  Not many people know that the US
refused to ever sign or abide by the ITU treaties on
telecommunications except those dealing with radio.

For the past 20 years, you had a similar dichotomy
manifested in the OSI vs. Internet approaches.  OSI
was the official decreed public network approach,
and the Internet was the unofficial private cooperative
approach.

What seems likely to emerge - through individual private
initiative, litigation, Congressional action, EU action,
ITU action - is a situation where a similar dichotomy
will emerge in Internet space.  It already exists in most
other areas - e.g., authentication, content control,
privacy, etc.

If one conceptualizes DNS as Paul Mockapetris originally
articulated in RFC 882, as just a distributed database,
it's possible at either the root level or at the TLD level
to partition the zones into "public" regulated ones, and
"private" unregulated ones.  It doesn't seem like a difficult
arrangement to effect, and indeed - one way or another -
this is the direction things seem to be heading.

This could be accomplished entirely within ICANN, or across
one or more additional ICANN like entities.  Jon Postel
acted more as a facilitator among competing camps than
a singularity.  He allowed natural diversity to occur. 
What has unfortunately ensued is that his successor has
constituted itself to be a monolith.  "One size fits all"
doesn't work well when you're attempting to get a million
networks and 50 million hosts to share their resources.


--tony