[ncdnhc-discuss] Paul Hoffman's end ICANN proposal

[Jefsey Morfin]

Genuinely American. Selling what belongs to all. For the rest I strongly 
advise to reread ... RFC 920.
Thx for good support of the splits in tasks. But we need to protect the 
Internet from the ITU/T and the ITU/T from the Internet. The target is not 
to make the ICANN survive, but to permit the world to develop.
jfc



On 21:49 25/04/02, James Love said:
>http://www.proper.com/ICANN-notes/dns-root-admin-reform.html
>
>Reforming the Administration of the DNS Root
>Paul Hoffman
>April 25, 2002
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>       Table of contents
>       1. Introduction
>       2. Run the DNS root for the two most important constituencies
>       3. Give the ccTLDs more say in the content of the DNS root
>       4. Set up a TLD Secretariat
>       5. Add 25 new TLDs every six months
>       6. Let the current gTLDs continue as-is
>       7. Let the ASO run itself
>       8. Let the PSO run itself
>       9. Stop perpetuating the hoax of Internet user "representation"
>       10. Let ICANN gracefully shut down as soon as the TLD Secretariat is
>operational
>
>         1. Introduction
>       The president of ICANN has admitted the obvious: The ICANN system is
>broken. However, most responses to the issue have focused on reforming ICANN
>instead of looking at solutions to the original problem, which is the stable
>management of the DNS root. This essay deals with reformation of the DNS
>root administration, not ICANN reforms.
>
>       After many years, there are still widely varying views on what ICANN
>is supposed to do and how much power it should have. Fortunately, the past
>three years with ICANN have offered many lessons, and most of those lessons
>point to the same conclusions:
>
>         a.. Commercially run TLDs act like regular businesses. They maximize
>profits, minimize costs, and only change when threatened with dire
>consequences.
>         b.. Running open-policy discussion forums with participants who will
>never have to do the work to follow through on any of their suggestions
>rarely leads to consensus or even general satisfaction.
>         c.. When an administrative body threatens punishment but doesn't
>follow through, governed entities begin to ignore the administrator, thereby
>diminishing the reputation of both parties.
>         d.. Too many unrelated goals diminish an organization's ability to
>make progress on any of them.
>         e.. Promising administrative representation to countries or
>individuals, and then reneging on that promise, engenders justifiable,
>widespread mistrust.
>         f.. Excessively restricting the number of new TLDs ensures that the
>vast majority of registrations in those TLDs will go to name speculators or
>existing name holders, not to new users.
>       While ICANN looks unfixable, the DNS root is still manageable. Where
>ICANN has floundered, the DNS root operators have fostered a useful and
>stable Internet naming system. This part of the Internet has weathered the
>massive growth of both traffic and avarice, and its resilience is admirable.
>
>       This proposal is not intended as a criticism of the people who have
>spent years working for or with ICANN. These people have worked hard in an
>incredibly unfriendly atmosphere. Unfortunately, the result hasn't worked
>for the Internet.
>
>       As with any proposal for fixing the DNS root administration, the ideas
>put forth here are merely suggestions until the DNS root server
>administrators have agreed with them. Hopefully, they will agree that these
>proposals would lead to more stability and usefulness for the DNS and will
>want to move forwards with them.
>
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>       2. Run the DNS root for the two most important constituencies
>       ICANN was supposed to provide administration for two main groups: root
>server administrators and the people of the world. Over time, the business
>interests of domain name registrars, registries, and commercial name-holders
>became much more important to ICANN than the stability of the DNS root or
>the usefulness of the DNS for the masses.
>
>       The severity of this misdirection is evident in the proposals to
>reform ICANN. Most have emphasized changing the composition of the board of
>directors or the supporting organization without showing how the change will
>help the DNS root or the people of the world. Simply having different people
>on the ICANN board won't necessarily change ICANN's focus or its methods.
>The overriding assumption is that ICANN should exist because it currently
>exists, although its existence has not yet helped the DNS's most important
>constituencies.
>
>       DNS stability and usefulness should be the main focus of whoever
>administers the DNS root, without regard to profits for companies in the DNS
>market. Part of that stability is technical, but most of it is political.
>The ccTLDs are the natural focus for this stability. Mis-identifying an
>entire country is much worse than mis-identifying a company. ICANN's rough
>treatment of the ccTLD operators -- typified by charging countries for ICANN
>membership instead of slightly increasing fees for commercial vendors in
>order to support the ccTLDs for free -- shows that ICANN doesn't understand
>its constituency.
>
>       Since ICANN's creation, people all over the world have been asking for
>a much broader selection of TLDs. ICANN responded by slowly creating a few
>new names that were supposed to be tightly controlled. ICANN then abandoned
>that control by failing to enforce the agreements that the new TLD
>administrators had promised to follow. Further, it has shown no interest in
>adding more useful names. ICANN doesn't plan to evaluate the success of the
>new TLDs for at least another year, though their failure is fairly obvious.
>There's been essentially no significant use of the new names.
>
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>       3. Give the ccTLDs more say in the content of the DNS root
>       The ccTLDs are the closest thing we have to names run by organizations
>(or rather, countries) that are responsible to regular people. Regardless of
>arguments over the state of democracy in the world, countries are more
>representative of the masses than are corporations. Countries should have a
>greater say in how country-related names appear in the DNS root.
>
>       ICANN has been a terrible conduit for organizing countries.
>Fortunately, countries already have a long-standing, stable organization for
>which they have respect: the United Nations (UN). For all of its faults, the
>UN has proven stable and useful, and is certainly more widely recognized
>than ICANN.
>
>       Given the massive problems that the UN has dealt with in the past 50
>years, naming countries in the DNS root will be a minor task. The UN even
>has a political/technical affiliate that would be happy to take over the
>job: the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which is a specialized
>agency of the UN's Economic and Social Council.
>
>       While the ITU isn't well regarded in Internet circles, it's already
>internationally recognized because the ITU administers country-code numbers
>for the telephone system. The organization knows how to deal with
>international politics in the technical arena, and even has the legal right
>to do so. What's more, countries already have representatives in the ITU. In
>the past few years, the ITU has begun to understand the importance of the
>Internet and the problem of naming countries, possibly better than ICANN.
>
>       Each country would continue to have control over its own ccTLD name.
>Further, a majority of the ccTLD body should be able to overrule any new
>TLDs added to the DNS root. For example, if an American company wanted to
>control a new TLD ".china", or if the government of China wanted to control
>a new TLD ".usa", the ccTLD body would most likely prevent those new names
>from being delegated.
>
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>       4. Set up a TLD Secretariat
>       We've tried running the DNS root with a large, ponderous committee
>that lacks focus. Let's learn from the experiment, and return authority over
>the root zone to a single person who is trusted and respected by the main
>constituencies (the root server operators and the people of the world). A
>new TLD Secretariat would resemble the long-standing system that was in
>place before ICANN.
>
>       The TLD Secretariat could easily be a single person. Her or his
>allegiance would be first to the root server operators, then to the ccTLDs,
>and lastly to the gTLDs. A stable, well-respected, international Internet
>organization would appoint the TLD Secretariat. While there are benefits to
>having the ITU organize the ccTLD administrators, it would be completely
>unsuited selecting the TLD Secretariat because it isn't well regarded in the
>Internet community or by the root server operators. The Internet Society
>(ISOC) would be a much better choice.
>
>       Given ICANN's current penchant for secrecy and closed meetings, the
>new TLD Secretariat will have a harder time gaining the world's trust.
>Fortunately, it wouldn't be difficult to make all correspondence to and from
>the TLD Secretariat a matter of public record. Although this might initially
>cause some consternation for the commercial registries that have benefited
>from ICANN's methods, it will build trust in the system.
>
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>       5. Add 25 new TLDs every six months
>       ICANN's failure to introduce a significant number of useful TLDs has
>led to speculation that there is no market for new TLDs. It's true that
>names in the new TLDs are barely being used, and that the vast majority of
>registrations in the new TLDs are to name-squatters. However, remember that
>ICANN saddled the new TLDs with rules that ICANN now doesn't enforce, and
>also restricted users to a small number of names.
>
>       A TLD Secretariat could radically change this situation without much
>effort or politics. After the TLD Secretariat was in place, there would be
>an auction every six months. Everyone who wanted to own or manage a new gTLD
>(and was technically qualified to do so) would send an application for a
>particular name with a check to the TLD Secretariat. All checks would be
>validated. At a pre-defined date, the checks would be sorted by value and
>the name associated with each one of the biggest checks would be matched
>against the existing TLDs and the newly won names. The list would be
>approved by the ccTLD administration, and if the ccTLD administration
>removes some from the list, additional names will selected so that the
>result was a total of 25 new gTLDs were added. The minimum bid would be
>US$10,000 to make sure that the costs of running the auction don't become
>higher than the value of the new TLDs, and the winners would have to show
>that they could properly run the name servers for the new gTLD.
>
>       The process of choosing the names would be completely open to
>observation, and decisions made by the TLD Secretariat would be simple and
>nonpolitical. On the date of the auction, all of the applications (not just
>the successful ones) would be published.
>
>       The TLD Secretariat would give a monopoly on the name for 25 years
>from the date of auction. There are no rules on what the new gTLD owner can
>or cannot do with the TLD other than that they must properly run five
>geographically and topologically distributed name servers for the TLD. The
>name owner would be able to use registrars in a fashion similar to the gTLDs
>today, or they could manage the registration themselves. Just as with
>current second-level domains, each TLD name owner would have a monopoly on
>the name, although there would be nothing preventing someone else from
>getting similar name if they wanted to pay for it. (Getting ".coolname"
>would not prohibit someone else from getting ".cool-name" or ".koolname".)
>Also like current second-level domains, the monopoly would come with no
>strings attached. Each owner could run the business part of the TLD as well
>or as poorly as he or she wanted, as long as they ran the technical part
>adequately.
>
>       ICANN has paid lip service to the idea that the business part of the
>new TLDs must be run well. However, it has consistently failed to impose any
>sanctions for the obvious transgressions on the part of gTLD operators. For
>example, the .name TLD has lots of registrations for domains that are
>obviously not personal names (such as "a.funny.name"), and registrations by
>people who don't have that name (look at the registrations for almost any
>famous person's name). Because of this, the TLD Secretariat would offer no
>customer service protections. As with most services in the commercial world,
>people who bought names from the new gTLD owners would have to enforce the
>rules through their local or national court systems.
>
>       In fact, a new gTLD owner wouldn't even have to let anyone register
>under it. If someone were to pay a lot of money for a vanity gTLD that only
>he or she could use, that would be just fine. Allowing for such situations
>wouldn't reduce the stability of the DNS root, and trying to force a gTLD
>owner to allow registration under the gTLD without any good enforcement
>mechanism would lead to the silly situations that ICANN is currently
>fostering. Of course, the fact that only the 25 highest bidders will get
>names will probably reduce the number of successful vanity bids because most
>gTLD owners would want to sell names in order to recoup purchase costs.
>
>       Initial auctions would probably raise US$millions, which is obviously
>more than enough funding for the TLD Secretariat. The auction income would
>first create an endowment that would keep the TLD Secretariat and IANA
>staffed for at least 25 years. If there were profit beyond those needs, and
>it's extremely likely there would be, the rest could go toward research in
>global DNS management and technologies, and development of the next
>generations of Internet naming services.
>
>       At some point, people won't want to own new gTLDs. The auction process
>should be publicly re-evaluated after five years. (Why not sooner? ICANN's
>constant re-evaluation process is one of the major causes of its inability
>to move forward. Stability is a much more important goal.) After the
>auctions have stopped, if they ever do, the TLD Secretariat would continue
>to do maintenance, research, and writing. Remember that the TLD Secretariat
>is also responsible for handling name changes and additions for the ccTLDs,
>and those countries will be around for a lot longer than 25 years. Given
>that the TLD Secretariat-issued contracts are for 25 years, the office will
>need to be around for a very long time by Internet standards.
>
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>       6. Let the current gTLDs continue as-is
>       Despite the general animosity toward many of the current gTLD owners,
>there is no clear way to re-allocate the names over which they have a
>monopoly. They should retain their names for the next 25 years under terms
>similar to ICANN's, except that they wouldn't have to pay the TLD
>Secretariat.
>
>       True, this would reward some companies that have shown incredible
>greed and incompetence, but there's no reasonable way to reapportion the
>names without falling into a hopeless pit of legalities. Oh, well. It should
>be noted that some people are so upset about the current gTLD owners that
>they would spend years trying to wrest control of the current gTLDs away
>from them. While such fights may be personally fulfilling, they would not
>build more stability into the DNS root and make more names available to the
>people of the world. Stability for everyone is much more important than
>personal satisfaction.
>
>       One huge difference between the current gTLD owners and the proposed
>new gTLD owners is that the current owners would have to continue the
>registration procedures that they agreed upon with ICANN. If the current
>owners did not live up to that agreement, the TLD Secretariat would simply
>open their gTLD names for bidding in the next auction. This way, the
>registrar community that has built up around the current gTLDs would
>continue to exist (and possibly grow, if the new gTLD owners want to use
>registrars), and the gTLD owners would gain money that they aren't paying to
>ICANN.
>
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>       7. Let the ASO run itself
>       Originally, many of us who formed ICANN thought that it would be able
>to focus on multiple technical topics simultaneously. We were grievously
>mistaken. ICANN as a group has never fully grasped the goals or problems of
>the three regional Internet registries (RIRs), such as IP route table
>growth, address allocation policies, and so on. (An excellent overview of
>the RIRs can be found in the December 2001 issue of the Internet Protocol
>Journal.)
>
>       The three RIRs that make up ICANN's Address Supporting Organization --
>Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE), Asia Pacific Network Information Center
>(APNIC), and American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) -- haven't gotten
>much, if anything, out of being organized by ICANN. They already have lots
>of formal cross-NIC ties, so nothing will be lost if there's no ASO in
>ICANN. These are mature, well-run organizations; they'll form their own
>independent group with their own leadership if need be. Saddling them with
>the ICANN mess won't help them, nor will it help the Internet deal with IP
>address allocation issues, nor will it help the stability of the DNS root.
>
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>       8. Let the PSO run itself
>       Similarly, the organizations in ICANN's Protocol Supporting
>Organization -- Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), World Wide Web
>Consortium (W3C), International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and European
>Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) -- haven't gained much value,
>if any, from being organized by ICANN. These groups already have lots of
>cross-organization ties and official liaisons, so nothing will be lost for
>them if there's no PSO.
>
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>       9. Stop perpetuating the hoax of Internet user "representation"
>       Governmental representation requires reasonably accurate voter
>registration and solid measures against cheating in the elections. People
>who understand the Internet and security know that it's impossible to
>accurately register human Internet users if there's much incentive for false
>registration. Election fraud would also be trivial; even if votes couldn't
>be forged, denial-of-service attacks in electronic elections are much easier
>to carry out than in physical elections. Preventing registration and
>election fraud for an international online election with hundreds of
>millions of potential voters would easily cost US$billions.
>
>       As Harald Alvestrand points out in his excellent essay on ICANN
>reform:
>
>               We can thus group voting proposals [for elected
>representatives] into three groups:
>               a.. Easily breakable, gamable, or fakable,
>               b.. Very expensive,
>               c.. Nonexistent.
>
>
>
>       Many of us wanted to believe that elections were possible, but we now
>know that if there were more than a few tens of millions of eligible voters,
>such elections would be a security nightmare. It's cruel to tell Internet
>users who don't fully understand security concerns that they should be
>represented in Internet governance, and then later say "we couldn't figure
>out a way to hold the elections." Of course users wills be frustrated and
>angry, particularly if they cannot understand why it's so much harder to
>hold elections on the Internet than it is face to face.
>
>       Internet users don't need direct representation in the TLD naming
>process. Instead, they need venues for learning about, and affecting, their
>own governments' regulation of the Internet. Let's face it, gTLD names are
>far less important than content suppression and restricting Internet access
>to certain groups of people. Getting Internet users to focus on ICANN
>because it was the only game in town has done a disservice to those users,
>particularly when it became clear that ICANN elections for end-user
>representatives would either cost hundreds of times of ICANN's budget or
>would be easy targets for fraud.
>
>       The good news is that there are growing venues for Internet users to
>learn and become active about important Internet issues. The At-Large
>Membership Study Committee did an admirable job in looking at what the
>concerns of Internet users would be if they could elect representatives to
>ICANN, or more likely, some other Internet governance body. Lots of the
>information they gathered is probably more relevant outside than inside
>ICANN. Recently, the Internet Society (ISOC) has made its individual
>membership free and has increased the value and power of its local chapters.
>ISOC represents the best chance for individuals throughout the world to
>listen and be heard on the important topics that affect the Internet.
>
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>       10. Let ICANN gracefully shut down as soon as the TLD Secretariat is
>operational
>       The folks at ICANN know that they have a thankless job, they hear it
>from a zillion people every day. They can see how little they've
>accomplished over the past three years, even though many of them have worked
>incredibly hard during that time. Why force this group through a major
>overhaul of the ICANN structure when the evidence suggests that two years
>from now we'd still have as little to show for it?
>
>       As soon as the TLD Secretariat is set up, ICANN can start to shut
>down. As that happens, the less civil participants may try to make ICANN
>leadership feel bad about the somewhat tortuous experiment, or to make them
>look bad in public. The heightened level of animosity and competitiveness in
>the ICANN process can be addictive to those involved, and old disputes may
>be hard to give up. However, neither of the real goals here (stability of
>the DNS root and usefulness to the people of the world) would be served by
>giving ICANN staff or board members another kick on the way out the door.
>Let's be civil, and begin to clean up the mess that all of us have helped
>make.
>
>
>
>--------------------------------
>James Love mailto:james.love at cptech.org
>http://www.cptech.org +1.202.387.8030 mobile +1.202.361.3040
>
>
>--------------------------------
>James Love mailto:james.love at cptech.org
>http://www.cptech.org +1.202.387.8030 mobile +1.202.361.3040
>
>
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