Re: "the great CORE meeting in Washington"

[Patrik Fältström <paf@swip.net>]

As I was there, talking, I will correct some issues that are clearly wrong.
I will not comment on the impression of the meeting that the author has, as
that is an objective view that stands for him, and noone else.

As a background you can see on the invitation that this is the third
meeting in a series describing the process, nothing else. The two first
meeting were held in Tokyo and Brussels during the fall of 1997. We of
course hoped in being able to tell more about the discussions with mr
Magaziner, but that was not possible as the groundbreaking discussions were
held with Magaziner late wednesday evening, and neither CORE, nor POC had
had time to discuss the results before the thursday meeting. Thursday
evening, CORE and POC made up their minds on how to handle the cituation,
so if the POC meeting would have been held on the friday, it would have
been a different story.

> From:	Robert Cannon [SMTP:cannon@DC.NET]
> Sent:	Friday, January 23, 1998 3:12 AM
> Subject:	CORE Stalls Pending Magaziner Report
> 
> CORE (the group running the Internet Society's [ISOC] DNS plan) decided
> to hold its meeting in Washington DC this week and have a dog and pony
> show (self-described) for Congress, Magaziner, and the Press.  I just
> came from what was supposed to be an all day event.  It is clear that
> CORE is stalling pending the outcome of the Magaziner report. And well
> it should.  One news report indicated that Magaziner was going to
> recommend that CORE get only one new TLD, not seven.  Net Fusion is
> today reporting that Magaziner is going to recommend against the CORE
> altogether and recommend that the feds set up a non-profit to run the
> DNS.

What mr Shaw and Maher tried to explain was the difference between a
registrar and a registry, and that this idea with "one, two or five" is how
many domainnames CORE as a registry is getting. All registrars in the new
system is to be able to register in all domains, regardless of what
registry is running it.

> Anyway, about the meeting.  The CORE meeting for Congress started one
> hour late.  Why?  Because the people who want to run our DNS system
> could not get their laptops running correctly.

Well, it was not one hour late, because the meeting was to be started with
coffee etc, and it did. It started probably about 30 minutes late, not one
hour.

The problem was that the LCD project that was delivered with FedEx the same
morning to the administrators of the meeting had gone up in smoke during
transport. The administrator promptly ordered a new projector, which
arrived as you saw.

This was not some problems with the PCs.

> Having worked out the technical glitches, they started with no agenda.

The agenda was presented by mr Maher. We didn't have a _printed_ agenda,
that is correct. mr Maher presented the day in the beginning of his talk.

> Maher got up and said
> that he was not going to tell what the agenda was for the day long
> meeting since we already knew what it would be (this is sort of
> consistent with Shaw's comment that the IAHC was an open process cause
> they talked to lots of people).  When the ISOC staff in the hallway were
> asked what that meant, no one knew.  They didnt know who was speaking
> and or what would be said.
> Maher (Chairman of CORE who happens to be the trademark attorney for
> McDonalds - anyone smell conflict of interests, or at least a lot of
> bias?) and Robert Shaw got up, complimented each other, made fun of
> those who criticized them, and proceeding to inform the audience of the
> past ten years of DNS history - almost nothing about the present. 

mr Maher is chair of POC, not CORE.

mr Shaw said explicitely several times that the present DNS was to be
presented in the afternoon by me and dr Black.

> Maher
> did say that CORE had met with Magaziner all week long but he wasnt
> going to tell us what was said.  He didnt know when the Magaziner report
> was coming out.  He didnt know when the NSI contract would expire.  He
> didnt know when they were going on line.  He didnt know how many TLDs
> they would in fact have.  He would say what they talked about with
> Magaziner or what Magaziner said to them.  And he wasnt telling what was
> taking place at the current CORE meeting.

Well, this is sort of an objective reading of the meeting I will not
comment so much on. It is the case that Magaziner himself at _every_
meeting with us gave us different answers of all of these questions! Maher
did tell that the report was to come out friday (last friday) or the coming
week. Indications closer than that was not given to us from USG. Clear
indications about the contract with NSI was given either. Maher did also
say that important issues, like how the selection process of registries is
to be done in the new system is not clear yet -- and that this shows how
confused the USG is at the moment. Confused because they seem to have
problems answering these questions, and at the same time indicate that the
report can be out "any day now".

> So what did they say?  The TLD ".store" will be replaced by ".shop"
> That's it.  That's news from the great CORE meeting in Washington.

Well, you forgot the other people that talked. The new non-voting person
from WIPO, Christopher Gibson, explained the challenge process in detail,
including changes between version 2 and version 3, i.e. the result of the
RFC of the 2nd version that have been out from POC. The 3rd version is out
for comments now by the way. After lunch, Dr Black explain his experiences
with running a shared registry, and I talked about the current DNS system.
Last of the day, Leni Mayo from CORE explained how the SRS software works,
and in detail how the round robin function is to work in detail. 

Questions were received after each speaker, and there were a couple of
issues that were not in the talks that were discussed, for example the
differences between DNS and directory services, what a registration
actually is etc etc. There were also a number of questions to Dr Black
regarding their dispute resolution process. I don't remember them all.

I.e. the subjective view of the talk by mr Shaw and mr Maher was just a bit
of what happened during the day which was from 9.30 to 3.40.

   Patrik


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