[wg-c] Response to Mueller in Working Group C

[Eric Brunner <brunner@world.std.com>]

Some comments on the Mueller Position Paper, entitled "ALTERNATIVE REPORT"

The Mueller text of October 8th, 1999 is reviewed. A subsequent version has
appeared, but too recently to be reviewed. Professor Mueller invited the
author of the position paper advocating a TLD for the Indigenous Peoples
of North America to subordinate their interests in the DNS root to those
expressed in his position paper.

The NCDNHC-Discuss@LYRIS.ISOC.ORG list is bcc'd for four reasons:
	1. It is the DNSO constituency which Professor Mueller is
	   presently associated,
and
	2. The NCDNHC charter states that the NCHNHC "must provide
	   the voice and representation for ... human rights and the
	   advancement of the Internet as a ... system available to
	   all segments of society"
and
	3. Professor Mueller's invitation that the National Congress
	   of American Indians subordinate their interests to those
	   advanced by his position paper.
and
	4. The archives of this list fail to disclose the issue of
	   conflict between Indigenous polities and interests and
	   "free market" forces, animated by Professor Mueller.

Executive Summary:
 
The ALTERNATIVE REPORT charges the Working Group C Statement of Consensus
of bad faith and underspecification. 

The ALTERNATIVE REPORT charges section VI-B(3)(b)(7) of the ICANN By-Laws of    
bad faith and underspecification.

The ALTERNATIVE REPORT charges the "public trust" mission of the IANA and
its successors in interest of bad faith and underspecification.

The ALTERNATIVE REPORT recommends converting a critical operational system
to experimental use.

The ALTERNATIVE REPORT is not co-signed by Eric Brunner, nor referred to
the National Congress of American Indians, nor any Indigenous polity or
group, except with these comments.

Detailed Summary:

>NEW GTLDS: COMPETITION, INNOVATION, AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY.
>AN ALTERNATIVE REPORT FROM MEMBERS OF WORKING GROUP C
>
>1. Adding new gTLDs to the root is an important part of ICANN's
>mandate ...

While it is true that ICANN had a charter which nominally placed it at
risk of being snubbed for failing to replace a controversial policy of
negligence with multiple instances of the same policy, a fictive
"free market" in the domain names industry, the colored paper series
of US DoC requirements has been substantively altered by the Tentative
Agreements among ICANN, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and Network
Solutions, Inc. With the Tentative Agreements, ICANN's stewardship of
the DNS is not subject to a test of its interest in affording equity
of opportunity to arbitrary entities seeking monopoly or quasi-monopoly
right of access to the DNS root for the purposes of economic gain.

To reason from the obsoleted colored paper series, particularly the
various statements of intent, to the conclusion that ICANN presently
faces objective requirements to substitute responsible, engineering
dominated stewardship of the DNS root and all policy, jurisdiction,
law and service models, for the policy goal of creating a "free market"
which permits no competing policies to operate, ignores the content
of the Tentative Agreements.
 
The mandate that ICANN cause new gTLDs to arise continues to exist,
but the "competitive free market" agenda was addressed to the formal
satisfaction of the Department of Commerce, leaving ICANN the task
of causing new gTLDs to arise for engineering, law, and service
model reasons, and which meet the test for being reasonable. The
Tentative Agreements do not foresee revisiting the "competitive free
market" agenda until 2003, absent performance failure by a party to
the Tentative Agreements.

>2. Demand for new gTLDs

If there were no demand for new gTLDs, this exercise would be moot.

Interestingly, this ALTERNATIVE REPORT proposes to resolve business
practices subject to legal sanction (cybersquatting) and subject to
regulation (trademark appropriation) now under development, by the
ruse of explosion, to some 500 new gTLDs, and the as yet unspecified
mechanism to prevent the replication of the current problems of
abuse and appropriation of a namespace disambiguated only by the
suffix formation rule.

Ironically, the problems cited as motivations for the recommendations
of the ALTERNATIVE REPORT, namespace exhaustion, could be as well
met by introducing hierarchical structure to the existing gTLDs as
by introducing parallel structure in the DNS root.

Therefore, while the issue of namespace exhaustion is not fictive,
the necessity to resolve it by one mechanism preferentially over
another is fictive. The authors of the ALTERNATIVE REPORT could
just as well use the same facts offered to propose reforms to the
operational practices of the existing gTLDs. The reason they do
not is economic, or academic self-interest.

A necessary consequence of adding gTLDs is consideration of the
operational practices of the associated registries of these new
gTLDs. The core issue is title to the data which comprises the
registry -- whether this data is held in trust, or is held by
the entities functioning as registries.

In the Tentative Agreements this issue is finally resolved for
the existing gTLDs. The Tentative Agreements were announced on
September 28th. The ALTERNATIVE REPORT appeared on October 8th.
This omission reflects the bi-modal nature of the community of
interests who's support the principle author of the ALTERNATIVE
REPORT solicited -- would-be registries seeking to obtain title
right to registry data and free market ideologues.


>3. The WG-C Recommendations

The ALTERNATIVE REPORT makes critical comment on the Working Group
C Statement of Consensus. The rational advanced for this is bad
faith, that the Statement of Consensus fails to state that the
word "testbed" does not have the ordinary Internet Community sense
of test followed by refinement and retest until general deployment
conditions are met. The ALTERNATIVE REPORT constructs the intent
of the the authors of the Statement of Consensus to explicitly
exclude reference to activities subsequent to the testbed period
and its evaluation. This construction then justifies the assertion
of need for a prescriptive narrative, the body of the ALTERNATIVE
REPORT's recommendations, where the Statement of Consensus leaves
off.

A constructive comment on the Statement of Consensus is that it
underspecifies outcomes. The ALTERNATIVE REPORT should not be
read as a modest amendation to a text which has the defect of
underspecification, but as a rejection of the underspecified
text and its replacement.

As a party to the Working Group C Statement of Consensus, this
is sufficient for this reader to decline the invitation extended
on more than one occasion to "co-sign" a document which constructs
my own meaning as a bad faith concealment of outcomes after the
testbed evaluation, and willfully substitutes principled caution
with prescribed but technically unjustified and intentionally
non-evaluated stages of explosive expansion.

The language of the principle author of ALTERNATIVE REPORT makes
it abundantly clear that the ALTERNATIVE REPORT is a rejection of
the Working Group C Statement of Consensus:

	... we believe that the proposal is far too limited and
	imposes undue restrictions on competition, innovation,
	and cultural diversity.

Note also that the fundamental area of innovation intended to
resolve the namespace exhaustion problem cited in the ALTERNATIVE
REPORT is providing an alternative to the DNS for the resolution
of common names. This work is currently organized as the Common
Names Resolution Protocol within the IETF, and no one associated
with the ALTERNATIVE REPORT is a participant in this technical
work, although NSI and this reader are.

Note further that the fundamental area of innovation intended to 
resolve the issue of competition, also cited in the ALTERNATIVE
REPORT, is providing an alternative to the registry/registrar
model. This work has taken place at NSI, and within the IETF in
the form of two mechanisms for shared registry systems (SRS),
and again no one associated with the ALTERNATIVE REPORT is a
participant in either technical activities, although NSI and three
members of Working Group C, including this reader, are.

Thus the appeal made to "innovation" is factually flawed and
offers only a symbolic, and misleading representation of both
the core set of technical problems in the areas the ALTERNATIVE
REPORT identifies as motivational, and their means of resolution.

Finally, as the sole author of a position paper to Working Group
C which intentionally addresses the issue of human rights in the
context of the DNS, I find the appeal made to "cultural diversity"
to be both cynical and ultimately as unconvincing as any other
proposition that social compacts derive from the policy of "free
markets".

>4. An Alternative Proposal

The Alternative Proposal sets a quantified schedule for action
in the DNS root, and no mechanism for qualitative or quantified
evaluation of the action. It is therefore a partial architecture
for fundamental alteration of a production system and insufficient
for rational risk analysis.

The Alternative Proposal places the burden of identifying metrics
for detection of system degradation under unprecedented change upon
a third party, surrendering both responsibility for assurance of
functional correctness and other non-functional requirements for
the unprecedented change which it is the author of, and tasking
a third party with a requirement with no means of determining the
ability of the third party to execute the requirement. This is
unsound engineering practice, and exposes the operator of the
production system to the consequences of "wanton and willful
disregard" tests upon system failure or perceived system failure.

The Alternative Proposal does not offer to indemnify the operator
or ICANN for the consequences of meeting its quantified schedule
for action in the DNS root. It therefore fails to meet the usual
criteria for stewardship, and if implemented, would be contrary to
stewardship.

>4.1 Competition Policy

The bad faith argument, raised previously, is repeated at some
length. No additional comment is necessary.

>5. Trademark Concerns and new GTLDs

The ALTERNATIVE REPORT argues that a trademark ought not apply to
the new, exploded namespace it advocates. This reduces to the very
familiar .TM argument, already rejected by ICANN, and exposes a
second fundamental breakdown of consensus, not within Working Group
C, but the DNSO.

Working Group C is a body of the Domain Names Supporting Organisation.
The DNSO is comprised of seven constituencies, created through ICANN's
recognition process. ICANN's Interrim Board extended recognition to a
candidate application for the ICANN VI-B(3)(b)(7) [ICANN By Laws]
Constituency. That Constituency is on record that confining marks
to some of the namespace is unacceptable.

Thus, the ALTERNATIVE REPORT is not merely a rejection of the good
faith construction of Working Group C's Statement of Consensus, but
of the recognition of one candidate for the ICANN VI-B(3)(b)(7)
Constituency, or its work-products, and of VI-B(3)(b)(7) of the
ICANN By Laws.

This is consistent with the public position taken by the principle
author of the ALTERNATIVE REPORT on the issue of trademark in the
DNS in the relevant venues prior to the formation of Working Group
C, and it is a rebuttable presumption that the ALTERNATIVE REPORT
is simply an attempt to argue previously settled issues on the
composition of the DNSO.


>6. Diversity and Competition in Registry Models

The recitation of controversy is restricted to the structural forms
of registries -- access models, corporate models, and string allocators.
The ALTERNATIVE REPORT then conclude that these are amenable to
reduction to "one fundamental issue".

This issue is then presented as a one-time choice between mutually
exclusive alternatives:

	explicit policy vs "market" policy

The relationship between data base access models and data base content
is unknown in the technical literature. The closest possible sensible
meaning is distributed systems and global coherency. The argument of
necessary reduction to some other "fundamental" is not supported by
the literature.

The relationship between corporate models and data base operational
success is not supported in the technical literature. A variety of
corporate models exist in the current DNS top-level, and in the set
of equivalent data bases with equivalent access models and operational
use histories exist broadly in the international governmental, NGO,
regulated and non-regulated sectors. The argument of necessary reduction
to some other "fundamental" is not supported by the literature.

Further, there does not appear to be any statement in support of the
ALTERNATIVE REPORT conclusion offered by the principle vendors of
commercial data base systems, e.g., Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Ingress,
etc. If the reductionist thesis were true, where "truth" was market
defined, then database vendors would predicate the applicability of
their product to the corporate models of their customers.

The relationship between data base access string allocators and data
base structure is well known in the literature. Strings are simply a
form of label, and label space taxonomies may be distinguished along
semantic lines. The argument of necessary reduction to some other
"fundamental" is not supported by the literature.

In summary, the relationship between the ALTERNATIVE REPORT recitation
and the synthesis offered is elusive.

Accepting for the sake of argument this unified vision on the set of
issues in controversy, the ALTERNATIVE REPORT reasons that ultimately
the issue is one of policy-by-elites vs policy-by-masses. The logical
consequence of this reasoning, or perhaps its predicate intellectual
analytic framework, is that the authors of the ALTERNATIVE REPORT are
not an elite, or if an elite, the vanguard of the masses and the sole
necessary elite for policy determination. Such a reasoning system is
self-contained.

Finally, the ALTERNATIVE REPORT omits the question of title and escrow
from the list of questions debated at length. This omission forms a
serious defect in the ALTERNATIVE REPORT, absent any other defect.
Comment specific to the issue and its omission from the ALTERNATIVE
REPORT are located in the final two paragraphs of comments on item #2
of the ALTERNATIVE REPORT.

Personal Note:

The errors in the October 8th version publically and privately brought
to the attention of the principle author of the ALTERNATIVE REPORT in
section 6.1 appear unaltered in the October 16th version. This is both
consistent with the  principle author's private communications to this
reader and with closed reasoning systems.

This ends my comments on the ALTERNATIVE REPORT.

Eric Brunner