[wg-c] Re: One summary of NO voting rationals [PPC and Rita's]

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

[I wish I hadn't yeilded to temptation and mentioned the one "late call" my
 peers have made, letting short-term address-mining fatally injure the IPv4
 end-to-end architecture -- the NAT issue. For the lawyers (other than Karl)
 NATs are jurisdictional demarks, causing heartache for network data service
 universalists. Sound familiar?]

Since we seem to be collectively looking over the edge of the no-process
abyss, there are some observations I've been sitting on since Mark Measday
wrote to me asking about broad interests -- country groups "abstaining",
corporate "noes", and industry "yeses", and mentioning the problem of global
service and territorial jurisdictions. Arm chair punditry on voters and
interests is a recreation anyone can partake, and is all I'll attempt here.
The global vs local I'll take up eventually -- its a paper I started six
months ago, in the personal context of IP and Distributed (Indian) Gaming,
and haven't yet finnished.

In Position Paper C three predicate conditions to the creation of new gTLDs,
if any are found to meet an unstated necessity condition, are stated:

  1) improved domain name registration procedures,
  2) implementation of speedy and effective UDRP for abusive registrations,
and
  3) adoption of a system for protecting famous and well-known trademark
	across all gTLDs. 

The first of this appears innocently open-ended, however unless my reading
of C is flawed, the requirement appears to be both topology-independent and
universal. The universalist theme appears in Rita's individual NO comment,
and is possibly implicit in other NO comments which mention implementation
or operational environment. I'll pass on the topological independence bit,
others have already mentioned in passing the existance of Lotter's surveys
and the fact that host, even domain names, are of little apparent interest
to the marks interests, if down a dot or so and not web-hot.

Is a universal registrant database, a grand unified whois database, funded?

Ignoring the possibility that the problem may not be tractible unless some
surprising constraints are imposed, who is funding this? Without a doubt it
would make tracking down the dubious registrants, or at least provide some
threashold for proof of service cost, but the claimant beneficiaries have
neither funded nor scoped the work. Are the marks associations going to put
up the engineering cost, and have they offered a operational date? I missed
this, and without both it sounds like an infeasible requirement. To be very
safe, the handwaving should be "it is out for competitive bid", and all of
the active DNS industry and IETFers who dork about with whois (e.g., Patrick
Faltstrom) ought to be able to suggest labor costing and delivery dates, as
they _must_ have been already asked or have helped draft the RFQ for this.

Personally I don't think it is worth the bother to find out. Not because
I oppose making life easier for the average trademark office IT staffers,
I don't think the marks interests will pay their own freight, and the worth
while of it all is up to them to define. I don't think there ever will be
any marks money on the table for technology development.

I also think that if a non-tractible problem, or one for which no compelling
technical necessity exists, is clearly and knowingly restated as a predicate
condition, that in a year's time the marks interests will be looking at the
wrong end of a pointed clarification, joining Tony, Karl, Milt, Roeland, and
the rest of the plural-rooters. 

The other two items are clearly observable in the immediate future, or due
from WG-B in finite time as a proposal, so all that is lacking is a statement
of when each condition may be observed to meet the requirements or to have
failed. 

In subsequent mail I'll attempt to engage each author of each predicate
condition expressed in the course of voting. What I suggest to the marks
interests is that they simply show me I've got the goat by the wrong legs,
and their first non-negociable is in fact tractible, if not trivial, and
funded or free.

Cheers,
Eric