Re: [alac] US DOC on Internet governance

["John R Levine" <johnl@xxxxxxxx>]

> [ re the US DOC memo ]

> Second, USG does indeed care, and very very much! Otherwise, .cu would
> have been out of the root since long, as .iq, .ly, and many others, at
> least for some period of time.  [ and if they did the root would split ]

I don't mean to pick on you personally, but assuming this analysis is
representative of the board's thinking, it's exactly the kind of painfully
naive politics that makes people wonder how long it's going to take until
ICANN is put under adult supervision.

Yes, the US has a long-standing boycott against Cuba.  No, that does not
mean that they automatically would take every opportunity to snipe against
Cuba.  Throughout the past 45 years it's been possible to send postal mail
between the US and Cuba, it's been possible to exchange e-mail with Cuba
ever since they got on the net, and the US has maintained a small
diplomatic mission hosted in the Swiss embassy to deal with the practical
issues of a country 150 km from the US.  I don't see any evidence that the
USG ever saw a political advantage to trying to cut off ccTLDs.  The .iq
domain was operated by some speculators in Texas but it has always been my
understanding that's because nobody more legitimate ever asked for it.

With regard to splitting the root, in practice, even if there were a
really good reason to switch to a different DNS root, the practical
problems in doing so are so great that it would never happen.  The IP
addresses of root servers are hard-coded into the configurations of every
DNS cache in the world.  Getting large numbers of system managers to do
anything, even something that is unambiguously to their advantage (as
switching roots is not) is phenomenally difficult.  Getting them to switch
roots just won't happen, no matter how badly ICANN and DOC screw them up.

R's,
John