Re: Notes (fwd)

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

On Wed, 1 Jan 1997, Christopher Ambler wrote:

> Okay, so we have some messages from Bill Manning and the notes from
> the meeting. What we don't have is a tape of the meeting. In the
> absense of that, we have many witnesses. I fail to see the relevance
> here.

Because his public statements have more weight, IMHO, than your personal
account of a meeting. Bill also stated publicly that he was hosting
a meeting "In the IETF tradition...". This tradition is that face-to-face
meetings are held to discuss issues but never to make any decisions.

> At the risk of being repetative (though there seems little recourse):
> The point is simple, and I'll state it once again. Image Online Design
> asked Bill Manning, as a representative of IANA, if we could go ahead
> with our .web registry as operational testing while we waited for the
> postel draft to be finished and approved. We were told yes.

As you can see, Bill said the same thing in somewhat more detail in 
a public message on the newdom list which I also posted here. Note the
emphasis on "experimental". 

The fact is that your commercial plans to operate a private brand DNS
registry for the .WEB domain appear to be screwed. You jumped to the wrong
conclusions when reading Jon Postel's draft proposal.

1. You failed to understand that a "draft" proposal is a discussion
   document that attempts to nail down a perceived consensus. It is not
   an edict from on high and is not something to use as the basis
   for a business plan.

2. Postel's plan proposed exclusive registries because he wrongly
   believed that it would be too complicated to have shared TLD's. It
   is understandable that he would make this wrong assumption since
   his expertise is as a high-speed networking researcher and not as
   an implementor of commercial databases. Of course, this is the
   whole purpose of a draft, to get assumptions down on paper so
   that people can either agree with them or show how they are faulty.
   And now that the TLD issue has moved to a committee with members
   who have some experience on implementing database systems it 
   appears that exclusive monopoly control of a TLD is out of the 
   question.

3. You also failed to understand the nature of IANA and from your
   statement above where you claim that Bill Manning is a "representative"
   of IANA, it appears you still misunderstand. IANA is not an
   organization and thus it has no representatives. IANA is not
   a governmental department and thus it has no representatives. IANA
   is a necessary activity in a shared network to ensure that
   names and numbers that must be globally unique are properly
   registered and known to all. The people who carry out this function,
   Joyce Reynolds and Jon Postel, have full-time jobs as researchers
   at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences
   Institute. This alone should be enough to indicate that IANA is
   not some high authority that grants commercial business franchises.

4. Even if monopoly registries had been created, the business case for
   making money as a registry was very slim. The windfall profits
   that fell into NSI's lap happened because of specific historical
   circumstances and no other registry could hope to match that situation.
   You are chasing a shadow here. Under the system that is likely to
   evolve in the next few months, it will only be feasible for ISP's,
   and other Internet related business, to act as registrars as a sideline
   to their main business. Just like a real rainbow, there is no pot of
   gold to be found at the end of this process.

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael@memra.com