Re: Notes (fwd)

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

On Wed, 1 Jan 1997, Christopher Ambler wrote:

> >   The IANA is a small "level of effort" task using several people part
> >   time.  The total of the effort adds up to the equivalent about 1.5 full
> >   time staff.  The individuals currently involved are Jon Postel, Joyce
> >   K. Reynolds, Nehal Bhau, and Bill Manning.
> 
> Ah, then Bill Manning *is* a member of IANA. Thank you.

There you go, twisting people's words again. I'm beginning to understand
why the word "wicked" originates in an Indo-european root meaning "to
twist". The statement by Jon Postel that I quoted seems to clearly
indicate that Bill Manning is not a member of IANA and never was a member
of IANA. It describes IANA as a "task" not as an "organization" and it
indicates that Bill was involved in the IANA tasks at that point in time. 
For all we know he may have been reviewing MIB's for network access
servers prior to registering them.

> >Quite frankly, if you stood up in a court of law and said "We made a deal
> >with Bill" the first thing the judge is going to ask is "Was there any
> >consideration exchanged, i.e. did money change hands?". Without money
> >changing hands there is no legally binding contract in all the
> >countries whose legal systems descend from English common law.
> 
> And now we get back to that $1000 check that Bill accepted.

In researching the public side of this story I find that the NEWDOM
archive at ar.com is actually missing messages from early August. I
discovered a reply that I posted to that list on August 2nd but my records
indicated that the original message was also posted to
domain-policy@internic.net so I examined their archives at
ftp://rs.internic.net/archives/domain-policy/domain-policy.9608

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    From: postel@ISI.EDU (Jon Postel)
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    To: JimFleming@unety.net, tim@fastlane.ca
    Subject: RE: IANA Payments
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    Hello:

    The suggestion that the IANA is accepting money to reserve new
    top-level domain is completely false.

    The IANA has not accepted any money in any form from anyone for domain
    name registration, name reservation, or other top level domain related
    function.

    --jon.

This was in reply to a rude, insinuating message written by Jim Fleming in
which he implies that because people are sending email applications to
IANA, therefore IANA must be collecting money. This was 3 days after the
meeting at ISI's offices. Here is a fragment from Fleming's message:

    Early reports from the IANA meeting this week indicate that they (the
    IANA) were accepting $1,000 payments (donations?) to help provide a
    little grease to keep the process moving...

A little later in the archive the attendees at the meeting are revealed:

    Chris Ambler  <chris@iodesign.com>
    John Frangie <john@hal.iodesign.com>
    Simmon Higgs <simmon@higgs.com>
    Dan Busarow <dan@dpcsys.com>
    Michael Gersten <michael@stb.info.com>
    Bill Manning <bmanning@isi.edu>

Then Karl Denninger says:

    Are you saying that none of them would ever take a sealed envelope
    from anyone without knowing what was inside of it? 

    I have just gotten off a 45 minute phone call in which that specific
    statement was made.

This is the first mention of the possibility that somebody gave IANA a
sealed enveloppe with a check inside. Shortly afterwards Chris Ambler
posted a message that included this statement:

    The issue of funds has been brought up, so here is what happened. I
    gave Bill Manning an envelope to include with our application to
    the IANA. As per the last draft, the fee for an application was
    outlined, and I felt it a good business decision to have that
    included with my application. No more, no less. Anything else is
    pure fabrication.

Once it was clear that there was a check in a sealed enveloppe, the
enveloppe was returned unopened as Bill Manning reports here:

        This envelope was stacked in to a manila folder with the
        handwritten notes from the mtg and some other papers that
        Simon and Dan left with me.

        The sealed, un-opened envelope has been returned to Chris
        via certified mail.

        Jon Postel was in no way involved in the meeting or discussions.
        The IANA activity was not responsible for the meeting or the
        actions of any of its attendes. 

        When a valid process for new registry creation for operation
        of Intenet Top Level Domains is approved, then is the time
        for proper application, with any fees as appropriate.

Simon Higgs who was at that meeting then confirmed what happened as
follows:

    >The IANA has not accepted any money in any form from anyone for
    >domain name registration, name reservation, or other top level domain
    >related function.
    >
    >--jon.

    This is a true statement. See below.

    [a requote of Chris's message has been removed here - md]

    I was at the table, sitting next to Chris as he wrote out the check.
    At the time it was explained by Chris that it was written to fulfill
    the requirements of a registry/TLD application fee described in the
    current work-in-progress draft-postel. You can go read draft-postel to
    get the fine-print.

    The check was refused by Bill Manning on behalf of IANA about a dozen
    times over the course of the meeting. Chris then requested that a
    sealed envelope be attached to his TLD application. 

    Unless IANA have opened that envelope, found a check inside, issued a
    receipt for that application fee, and reserved a particular TLD for
    Chris, Jon Postel's statement is entirely true. 

    I understand that the envelope in question is being returned to Chris
    to avoid further confusion. 

> You are, however, making many assumptions
> about a meeting which you did NOT attend.

I'm dealing with the *PUBLIC* record which is somewhat at odds with
your version of events. I don't need to attend a meeting in order to study
the public record.

> At the meeting, Bill asked me to provide him with a Perl script that
> would be used to count the number of SLDs that a registry had, in
> order to determine what the 2% yearly fee should be. Why did he ask 
> me to do this if he were not working on it for IANA?

Thousands of people on the Internet write code to do interesting and
useful things and then share that code freely with their peers. 

> You've shown that 
> he was a member of IANA at the time as well. 

He was doing stuff with the routing arbiter project and the NAPS and
something to do with tools development (i.e. useful PERL scripts) for
network operators. And this is just stuff that I know secondhand from
reading web pages and mailing list traffic. He also runs a very famous and
successful Bait and Sushi shop. But alas, he was not an IANA member, just
helping them out with some tasks that the main IANA people, Joyce and Jon,
didn't have time to do.

> IANA, in anticipation of the Postel draft becoming RFC, gave us the 
> go-ahead to go active with operational testing. It's all rather clear, 
> I'm afraid, regardless of your curious passion on the subject.

I think that Bill Manning's message of July 23rd is quite clear what
operational testing means.

> And you seem to have a personal vendetta against a company that has set
> up a registry in good faith after confering with the authority at the
> time. All we did is what IANA told us we could do. Nothing more, nothing
> less. If this comes down to a question in a court, then so be it. 
> Otherwise, your constant attacks on the facts as they've been shown
> is beginning to actually anger me

Don't take it so seriously. It's like a game of chess, you do have the
option to resign the game.


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