Statement of the Association of Information Technology Professsionals (formerly DPMA)

["Charles Oriez" <coriez@xxxxxxxxx>]

If I can add my own comments to the official statement below, allow me to
express my disappointment that GoDaddy, rather than ICANN, is acting to
support ICANN's charge of ensuring the stability of the Iternet.  The
presence of GoDaddy's name, rather than ICANN's, as the named plaintiff in
the suit against Verisign suggests that acting to preserve the stability of
the Internet is perhaps beyond the capabilities of ICANN, and the Dept of
Commerce was wrong to extend the MOU.

STATEMENT:

On September 16, the US Department of Commerce (DOC) extended the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)'s authority to manage
the Internet for three more years. Both ICANN and the DOC stressed that
"the Memorandum of Uunderstanding highlights ICANN's responsibility to
ensure the stability of the Internet..." Ironically, at the same time that
ICANN and the DOC were announcing this agreement, a serious challenge to
the stability of the Internet appeared, in the form of Verisign's
unilateral decision to begin providing incorrect information in answer to
dns queries for non-existent .net and .com domains, resulting in
misdirected email, broken spam filters, and other problems.

This presents an immediate opportunity for ICANN to demonstrate its level
of commitment to the principle of stability of the Internet in a dramatic
and public fashion.

ICANN should instruct Verisign to immediately stop giving incorrect answers
to any query in .com and .net, and should instead follow the IETF
standards. If Verisign refuses to do so, ICANN should re-delegate the .com
and .net zones to registries that are more willing to follow the DNS
standards.


Charles Oriez     coriez@oriez.org
39  34' 34.4"N / 105 00' 06.3"W
**
Lamport's Law:
A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer
you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.