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Dave
Crocker is a consultant at
Brandenberg Consulting along with
being founder and co-director of
the Internet Mail Consortium out
of Sunnyvale, CA. He helped
develop today's Internet mail
standards, and he performed early
work on domain name formats. An
Internet Society member, he is a
principal gTLD-MoU participant.
The text below, from his posting
on the list "gtld-discuss," is
used with permission.
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- Dave
Crocker
- Internet
Mail Consortium
- Sunnyvale,
California
- phone:
408 246 8253
- fax:
408 249 6205
- mailto:dcrocker@imc.org
- http://www.imc.org
- http://www.brandenburg.com
- (c)
1998 by Dave
Crocker.
- Used
with permission.
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We
are fast approaching a critical moment.
The process of reaching it has been
extremely public, so there will be no
surprise when the event occurs. The moment
is the request by IANA for addition of the
new generic TLDs (gTLDs) to the root DNS
servers. The request will be issued when
the gTLD-MoU's CORE project plans require
it for testing, prior to live registration
operation of these gTLDs. Nearly 90
companies have committed significant funds
and effort to this activity, so it's
rather more than a theoretical exercise.
It is a bottom-line matter for these
companies.
NSI is in an
unfortunate position of being faced with
open competition by this enhancement and,
at the same time, physically holding the
master root server to which these new TLDs
will be added. In some circles, having
control over a resource which enables the
creation of competition for one's
organization would be called conflict of
interest.
So there is
considerable import to the basis by which
NSI chooses to claim that it can add ISO
[national] TLDs [nTLDs]
but not add others, namely gTLDs. As a
constructive member of the Internet
community, NSI surely wants to makes its
position completely clear, as well as the
basis for that position.
[snip]
Further, NSI has
often cited the directive from NSF that it
not add TLDs without approval from the US
govern-ment, yet the text in that
directive is not constrained and NSI has
been continuing to add nTLDs. The
directive does not distinguish gTLDs from
nTLDs. Instructions
to add nTLDs have been coming from IANA
and the additions have taken place
immediately. Is there doc-umentation of
NSF approval for each one of these
changes? If there is not, then NSI has
been showing selective interpretation of
its instructions and is not merely the
mechanical participant it
claims.
The moment that
is approaching is the result of more than
1 year of open discussion and debate,
including many individuals, organizations
and countries all over the world. Ninety
(90) companies are now engaged in
producing fully competitive registration
services. It will do the Internet
community no good service to refuse to
take a directive from IANA and thereby
create an administrative crisis on the
net.
There is nothing
unknown about the request that will be
issued, except for the precise date and we
know that date is approaching quickly. If
NSI is planning to refuse that request, it
is time to tell that to the community and
explain the basis.
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