A sense of proportion, and a sense of closure....

[peterd@Bunyip.Com (Peter Deutsch)]

Ronda Hauben [mailto:ronda@panix.com] wrote on Wednesday, September 23,
1998 at 6:50 AM:
.  .  .
>The U.S. Government, without any explanation of its reasons
                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>has decided to make a drastic change in the operation and 
>oversight and control of these essential functions.
>This is a challenge to the world thrown out by the U.S. 
>Government.


I'd echo Pete Farmer's sentiments on this. The principles
*have* been outlined, and opportunity for debate provided.
We're now into the implementation phase.

I'd also add a follow-up thought. I've read a fair amount
about "Internet governance" over the past few months, as
if the entire IFWP process creates a new world order, or a
new trans-territorial governance structure. I can't escape
the feeling that people think the DNS is the heart of the
Internet, the IFWP process akin the U.S. Constitutional
convention and the very existance of DNS the main reason
the net has been so successful. Lots of people seem to have
invested lots of time here because of the implied view
that this can make or break the Internet in the new
millenium.

Sorry folks, I don't but it. I regard the Internet as the
digital equivalent of the index portion of the traditional
yellow pages. Bootom line is that things would continue to
work fine, albeit with some loss of functionality, without
it.

IMHO, the reason this process has attracted so much
attention is the simple fact that there is a fair amount
of money at stake here.  Now, I'm an entrepreneur myself
and I have no trouble with the concept of privatizing DNS,
since I do believe that competition is a "Good Thing(tm)",
but to me the biggest tragedy here is not that we failed
to establish a viable Internet constitution, but that we've
pretty much botched the chance to reengineer DNS. We're
now probably stuck with the current technology for another
digital generation, at least and that's a pity. The funny
thing is, that nobody has even mentioned it in all the
bylaw brouhaha. I do sometimes wonder that if we'd had a
split, might we not have seen a burst of clever
engineering to work around the political problems that
would have entailed?

I do hope that noone takes this message the wrong way. I'm
not trying to denigrate the importance of what's been
accomplished, since I'm now of the belief that we've
probably saved the majority of the operational DNS service
from what was looking to be a pretty ugle split, which
would have definitely hurt users a lot.  It's just that I
think we should approach this all with a sense of
proportion.

I think that we should also look at any lingering problems
we see in the final documents in the same light. Sure, we
could have done better, given an infinite number of
monkeys, an infinite number of keyboards and perhaps
another few weeks, (and if Karl hadn't pooped out on us
about 2am local time last night! ;-) but I feel that a
final cleanup pass on the Boston's group's effort, and
then a demonstration of willingness on behalf of IANA and
NSI to integrate these suggestions into the current
INAN/NSI draft and we should call it a wrap. The details
can be fixed in the next release...


				- peterd

P.S. I am CC'ing this to the comments@inana.org address
and would like it to be considered as an official
endorsement of the Boston group's efforts. I think this
was an important step in the process and their efforts
should be reflected in the final outcome.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Peter Deutsch,                                 (514) 875-8611  (phone)
  Bunyip Information Systems Inc.                   (514) 875-8134  (fax)
    <peterd@bunyip.com>                             http://www.bunyip.com



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			Appendix C, Summary of Changes
			The C Programming language, Second Edition

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