Re: Farber on self-governance

[Dave Crocker <dcrocker@brandenburg.com>]

At 10:05 AM 6/16/98 -0400, Will Rodger wrote:
>Below is a statement from Dave Farber, EFF board member, distinguished

Please forgive the strident tone of what follows, but the idea of looking
forward to starting over after 4 years of intense work, continuing to have
the network community give NSI an extra US$ 1M for every week that
meaningful competition is delayed, is just a bit frustrating.

Here is the response I sent Dave:

At 05:44 AM 6/16/98 +0900, Dave Farber wrote: 
>I find this very unfortunate -- no very dangerous. In back of the whole
USG process was, I believe, the hope that the network community was mature
enough to take on self governance. If we blow it the result will be
governance by Governments with all the negatives that holds for the future
evolution of the net.

Dave,

You continue to mis-understand the basic causes for the current situation,
and therefore misunderstand the way to fix it.

The Internet community WAS quite mature enough to handle the situation and
it was proceeding quite nicely to deal with it. Not smoothly or pleasantly,
but then it rarely is smooth or pleasant about a controversial topic. But
it copes and it was coping. 

The triggering topic, gTLDs, had been controversial for quite awhile and as
is usual for such things, a group was formed by IANA to solve the task. It
went about doing its job in the usual Internet style. A proposal was
formulated, feedback received, changes made, support garnered: 220
organizations so far, from around the world. That's not a trivial amount of
support.

What changed was that too many people -- some well-intention and some not
-- decided to attack the work rather than try to help improve it. Rather
than make specific proposals for specific changes, people decided to just
declare the process problematic or the composition of the group
inappropriate, or to find some other reason for rejecting the whole effort.
It didn't matter that the work was broad-based, that the support was
broad-based and that incremental change to the work was being pursued in
the usual, open fashion. It didn't matter that there were no other focused,
broad-based, concrete efforts. No, it was -- and continues to be -- more
fun to attack.

We might all have recovered from that, had it not been for the United
States Government. 

Remember that the USG created the original and compelling problem, by
giving NSI an instant US$50M/year revenue stream and thereby causing many
others to see potential for large amounts of easy money. Add to that the
legitimate difficulties because domain names can relate to trademarks and
we have a major pull for political maneuvering on a large scale. And that
is what we got.

So, having created the problem, the US Government then proceeded to fully
destabilize things by throwing into doubt IANA's authority and the
processes that IANA had established. The government has given credibility
to a set of rogue activities that were attempting to take over control of
the root of the DNS. These efforts failed on their own but are now formally
recognized as legitimate by the Government report. 

Worse, the US government has taken credit and taken over work that IANA
already had under way to move itself under a private corporation. And let
us not forget that the US government, rather than honor a process that was
open and garnered support from 220 organizations around the world, has
tended to give extraordinary weight to highly political efforts by a tiny
group of folks, who have no Internet technical or operations experience,
but do have questionable motives. 

So, Dave, if we want to consider seriously how to improve things, we need
to stop giving credence and assistance to people who have no constructive
intent and we need to get back to Internet basics. 

That means getting back to supporting IANA's efforts to evolve, the efforts
that it had underway for quite awhile, until they were derailed by the US
government and a quantity of political hangers on.

After more than a year of distraction, the government has come out
supporting essentially all of the principles and details of what was
already being done. Except that they have convinced people that we must
"start over" rather than "continue". After 4 years of effort, we must start
over?

To all who have found it so easy or necessary to contribute to these delays
and to the destablilization, we thank you. But it is time to stop
"inventing" and "starting". 

It is time to return to the processes we already had, and "continue" to
evolve them.

d/


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