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the roving_reporter  the roving_reporter [The roving_reporter doesn't much like winter. --Cheers, T] Please link using this permanent URL. Past issues: 2001-01-16 ICANN Journal 5: So much to reconsider... (21 articles) 2000-12-03 ICANN Journal 4: MDR2K, d00d! (15 articles) 2000-11-10 ICANN Journal 3: Whoiswho? (22 articles) 2000-10-15 ICANN Journal 2: Kicking ICANN Around (21 articles) 2000-09-10 ICANN Journal 1 (25 articles) 1999-11-24 Viral Regulation 1999-11-16 UDRP? JDRP > roving_reporter t byfield [email]  Thu Mar 1 00:02:47 EST 2001ICANN watchersThe Old Faithful of ICANN-related sites, ICANNwatch, has unveiled itsfacelift: a Slashdot-like news and comment forum. Good move. Betweenthis and the New Faithful of ICANN-related sites, Bret Fausett'sstellar ICANN Blog, theroving_reporter is could just about hang up his hat. Heh--well,maybe not...The new ICANNwatch and the ICANN Blog both serve functions that ICANNitself could and should be doing: providing a useful forum for inputand dialog, and providing timely, informative, and neutral news on itsactivities. Unfortunately, ICANN's failure in this regard has beensingularly and consistently spectacular: witness, only most recently, theprompt posting the testimony of Maximum Leader MikeRoberts and CoB VintCerf before the House and Senate committees, as opposed to the curiousabsence of Boardmember Karl Auerbach's Senatetestimony. (For a larf, see this rather candid "offtopic" assessmentof that inconsistency.)Kudos to Bret and the maintainers of ICANN watch -- in particular,Michael Froomkin -- for their efforts.Thu Feb 22 15:11:14 EST 2001annus-horribilis.qeii.caCIRA, Canada's new admin for the .ca ccTLD,has published its requirementsregarding who is eligible to register a domain: Canadian citizens, permanentresidents, legal representatives, corporations, trusts, partnerships,associations, trade unions, political parties, various kinds of educationalinstitutions, libraries, indian "bands," aboriginals, the government,registrants of trademark and official marks, and Her Majesty Queen ElizabethII and her successors.Fri Feb 9 15:24:40 EST 2001Not very NAIS at allAn impressive coalition billing itself as the NGO and AcademicICANN Study (NAIS) has written a remarkable open letterto Carl Bildt, who is slated to chair ICANN's At-LargeMembership Study Committee (ALMSC). In it, NAIS has made aninitial list of data and documents it wants access to: serverlogs from the systems used in ICANN's and election.com's handling ofthe election, registration records "of at least some informationcollected from users," mailing records, voting records, technicalspecifications, financial records, and "internal and externalcommunication of ICANN officers and staff regarding the election" --pretty much the whole shootin' match. The letter goes out of its wayto stress that NAIS is specifically not requesting personallyidentifiable data; however, it does say that ICANN should "make all ofthis election data available not only to the undersigned researchers,but to other research efforts as well." (For ravings on some of thesesubjects, see roving_reporter journals 1, 2, and 3 passim.)ICANN has also invited former boardmember Pindar Wong and CharlesCostello, director of the Carter Center's Democracy Program, to jointhe ALMSC as vice-chairs. The roving_reporter takes a dim viewof these invitations, particularly the latter. The Carter Center's statement on the MALelections got off to a shaky start by plopping out a real howler:"ICANN 'keeps the Internet running' and assigns high-level names and"-- perish the thought -- "through registrars, e-mailaddresses." More substantively, despite the CC's efforts to hedgetheir language ("reasonably," "subject to further review of theavailable balloting data," "based on a limited monitoring ofregistration," etc., etc.), the letter far overshot its ill-definedscope on key points. For example, it duly repeated ICANN's claimsabout spikes in request rates being the cause of registration serverproblems -- but failed to note that the server had been throttled down to process no more requeststhan ICANN's staff could support. (The CC agreed to answer a number ofquestions from the roving_reporter but, on receiving thequestions, fell silent.) Without casting aspersions on Mr. Costello'sintegrity, we nevertheless doubt that this record suggests hiscontributions to the ALMSC will be optimal.ICANN has also appointed a former NSF, DoC, and electronicstrade-group staffer, Denise Michel, as Executive Director of theALMSC.All very bottom-up, isn't it?Only fools make predictions. But since the roving_reporteris -- nay, takes pride in being -- profoundly foolish, wepredict that ICANN will be rather less than forthcoming with therequested materials. Specifically: ICANN will not release server logs for the machine on which its broken election "front end" ran because they probably didn't archive them; ICANN will not release webserver logs on the pretext that requesting IP numbers (or possibly looked-up DNS entries) can in some cases obviously be correlated with specific individuals; ICANN will not release MAL-associated financial records, because doing so could reveal ways in which it uses project-specific revenues to cover its general operating costs; ICANN will not release mailing records, because those records consist, in large part, of stacks of returned envelopes -- which of course would reveal personally identifiable information; and ICANN will not release internal correspondence because it would be too damn embarassing.We would, of course, be very pleased to be wrong about this. Mon Feb 5 16:25:13 EST 2001ICANN forgets to announce Congressional hearings [updated]Bright and early Thursday morning, Billy Tauzin's House Committeeon Energy and Commerce will hold hearings,titled Is ICANN's New Generation of Internet Domain Name SelectionProcess Thwarting Competition?, which "will focus on ICANN's recentlyannounced selections of registry operators for new top level domains."ICANN hasn't seen fit to note this among their announcements.[Crikey, yet another addendum (these things are killingme...): A roving_reader points out that ICANN's Correspondence pageeven includes a section devoted to the U.S. House Committee onCommerce. As noted in this space, though,that page is the informational equivalent of a Potemkin village. Asever, thanks for the pointer.]Mon Feb 5 16:22:02 EST 2001Wham, bam, thank you MAL [updated]Several sources present at the ICANN-Studienkreis 2-3February meeting in Zurich confirm that, in Marc Holitscher's paneldiscussion on the Membership at Large, Chief Policy Poobah AndrewMcLaughlin stated that the MAL "doesn't exist" anymore. Evidently,ICANN staff is flogging the claim that the MAL was just a temporarymechanism for "selecting" regional directors for the board -- andclaim, further, that this was the plan from the very beginning, it'sall in the documents, &c., &c.If indeed that's been the case all along, then why don't any of theMAL-related resolutions -- from Berlin(27 May 1999), Santiago(26 August 1999), LA(4 November 1999), Cairo(10 March 2000), or Yokohama(16 July 2000) -- mention it? And why did Mclaughlin expressconcern that the MAL was being "hijacked" at the Berkman Center MALpanel discussion in the PressingIssues II sessions prior to ICANN's November 2000 meeting inMarina Del Rey? Why is there no mention of it in ICANN's grantproposal to the Markle Foundation? And why hasn't ICANN's MAL site made any mentionof the MAL's transience -- not in the schedule, not in theFAQ, not in the rules? And, really, whywould the FAQ include this? Do I have to renew my membership every year? Yes. Members will be asked to reconfirm their membership data every year.Reconfirm their membership data. That means "change ofaddress." Not: "sign up again."Every once in a while, the roving_reporter's really gottacall a spade a spade: Andrew McLaughlin, ICANN's self-styled ChiefPolicy Officer, wouldn't know the truth if it hit him in the ass witha banjo. But it shouldn't be personal: he's just doing his job. ForICANN. And against you.[Addendum: McLaughlin writes (not necessarily in response): To reprise what I said in Zuerich: The At Large Membership does not exist in the form Hans [Klein, of CPSR] wants it to exist. At the moment, it exists in a state of suspension: Under the Bylaws, the membership was constituted for one purpose and one purpose only: to choose 5 Directors in 2000. After that, the At Large Study is supposed to figure out what sort of role and function it should have in the future. But, of course, there haven't been any registrations since July, and no activations since September. So it can't be a surprise to anyone that the membership database lies dormant, pending the outcome of the study.Too clever by half. First and foremost, it should be notedthat Hans Klein is far from alone in being dissatisfied with ICANN'shandling of the MAL. In fact, the roving_reporter would becurious to know of anyone who is happy with it. Secondly,roving_readers would do well to review, for example, the MAL FAQ -- written, oneassumes, by ICANN staff -- to see whether its language supports thepicture McLaughlin's presents. If it doesn't, then ICANN has onlyitself to blame.McLaughlin sees the paucity of explicit statements that the MALshould continue to function post-election as a positive andaffirmative justification for icing it. But another explanation -- onethat's much more sensible -- is that people assumed it wouldcontinue: that MALers would elect directors, that the directors wouldremain accountable and responsive through continuous input, and so on.That understanding is quite suited to an organization that purports tobe "bottom-up"; McLaughlin's pharisaical understanding is not.And for someone who claims to adhere so vigorously to the letter ofthe by-law,his claim that "the At Large Study is supposed to figure out what sortof role and function it should have in the future" is tendentious. Inpoint of fact, the current by-laws say the study will determine (notethe priorities): Whether the ICANN Board should include "At Large" Directors; If so, how many such Directors there should be; How any such "At Large" Directors should be selected, including consideration of at least the following options: selection by an "At Large" membership; appointment by the existing Board; selection or appointment by some other entity or entities; and any combination of those options; If selection by an "At Large" membership is to be used, the processes and procedures by which that selection will take place; andlast and also least... What the appropriate structure, role and functions of an "At Large" membership should be.That last question depends on the answers to the previous ones. Ifthe study were to determine that there should be no MAL directors, orthat there should be some but they shouldn't be elected, then it'shard to imagine what role or function the MAL would serve, now, isn'tit?But perhaps most noteworthy is McLaughlin's pedantic tone: heunderstands and is satisfied; Klein doesn't and is a malcontent. Ifthat's how ICANN's Chief of Policy regards the Chairman of the Boardof CPSR, imagine if you will, roving_worm, how he looks uponyou.] Mon Feb 5 01:48:30 EST 2001bq--0101001101... spells snafuBrace yourself: this one's very meta.The ICANNBlog notes a crypticresolution passed on 30 January by the Executive Committee ofICANN's board: VeriSign Multilingual Testbed RESOLVED [EC01.6], that until such time as the Board can further consider the matter, the Vice President and General Counsel is authorized temporarily to waive terms of the Registry Agreement between ICANN and Network Solutions, Inc. (also known as VeriSign Global Registry Services) as necessary to permit blocking of initial registration through non-testbed means of second-level domains within the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains intended for use within VeriSign's multilingual testbed. It took the roving_reporter a while to parse this Faustrollianjewel of bureaucratese, but we did it. Roughly translated, it sayssomething like: Until the board figures comes up with a damage-control plan, Louis Touton pretty much has carte blanche to stomp out multilingual-testbed-style domains we don't like.So what's the damage? Well, roving_readers may remember our20 January item, "Hawaii 2.0," in which wetried to make sense of the multilingual morass. Rising up from thatmorass, like the creature from the black lagoon, was the specter ofRACE -- the Row-based ASCII-Compatible Encoding standard, a kludge forusing ASCII to encode non-Latin characters.To organizations whose very existence depends on the currentASCII-only DNS architecture -- NSI (now VGRS), which is desperatelysqueezing every last cent out of it, and ICANN, whose raisond'être seems to be the surbordination of substantive technicalprogress to venal intellectual property interests -- RACE is a dreamcome true. It offers a way to service select Asian markets withoutmuddying their hands by coordinating a coherent restructuring of DNS ina way that would actually meet the needs of a global linguisticenvironment.And yet RACE is ASCII-"compatible"; that means RACE-"encoded" domains are ASCII. As VGRS's own Multilingual DNS FAQ states,"domain.com for a given language will be stored as bq--gde6djht.com."Since RACE describes analgorithm, the converse is true: bq--gde6djht will be rendered as"domain" in a given language. Which means that someone really clevermight register in ASCII domains that, when RACEd, correspondto, say, famous names or trademarks in a given language. Andthey might do so outside of the VGRS/ICANN "testbed" -- as onewould register any other domain (and for a lot less than the $199 VGRSis charging). If so, then those domains aren't provisional: they'rethe real thing.If indeed what we surmise sparked the Exec Comm's open-endedmandate for VP Louis Touton, such a hack -- beyond being seriouslyslick -- could pose immense problems for ICANN, its UDRP, and so-called"cybersquatting" in general. Even the literal one-to-one.comcorrespondence of trademarks to domains has proven to be profoundlycontroversial. "Substring" issues (e.g., verizonreallysucks.com) haveproven even more troublesome. But the idea that trademarks encompassstrings encoded with one standard but parsed with another -- forexample, that "Disney" also covers 64 case-insensitive binaryexpressions such as "010001000110100101110011011011100110010101111001"-- might be a tad too high-concept for even the most zealousproponents of "intellectual property" claims. But if a trademarkregistered in ASCII doesn't apply to binary, then why should it applyto RACE -- or to any other non-obvious encoding scheme? Now, the architects of RACE did anticipate this problem. PaulHoffman, in his Internet Draft draft-ietf-idn-race-02, notes: All post-converted name parts that contain internationalized characters begin with the string "bq--". (Of course, because host name parts are case-insensitive, this might also be represented as "Bq--" or "bQ--" or "BQ--".) The string "bq--" was chosen because it is extremely unlikely to exist in host parts before this specification was produced. As a historical note, in late August 2000, none of the second-level host name parts in any of the .com, .edu, .net, and .org top-level domains began with "bq--"; there are many tens of thousands of other strings of three characters followed by a hyphen that have this property and could be used instead. The string "bq--" will change to other strings with the same properties in future versions of this draft. [emphasis added]But Hoffman's subsequent remarks implicitly acknowledge that thisscheme is basically braindead, when he recommends that zone admins had better not name any hosts in ways that might confuddle RACE-based resolvers: Note that a zone administrator might still choose to use "bq--" at the beginning of a host name part even if that part does not contain internationalized characters. Zone administrators SHOULD NOT create host part names that begin with "bq--" unless those names are post-converted names. Creating host part names that begin with "bq--" but that are not post-converted names may cause two distinct problems. Some display systems, after converting the post-converted name part back to an internationalized name part, might display the name parts in a possibly-confusing fashion to users. More seriously, some resolvers, after converting the post-converted name part back to an internationalized name part, might reject the host name if it contains illegal characters.ICANN, the "technical coordinating body" of the internet,approved this standard as the way to meet the needs of East Asia. Andnow that the flaw in this scheme is revealing itself, the ExecutiveCommittee of ICANN's board has effectively suspended its agreementwith NSI and thereby granted its Veep free rein to put in a fix.[Addendum: The roving_reporter's surmise was correct.According to the draft Minutes of [MINC's] Registration Policy WG Meeting of 30 January, "19000 names [were] registered as pure ASCII"; the registry deleted them, but they were "re-registered seconds later." As always, thanks to the diligent peoplewho turn up these gems of documentation.]Fri Feb 2 01:57:01 EST 2001IANA_dysfunction.mp3The roving_reporter is very pleased to report that,through dogged persistence and the kindness of strangers, he hasobtained a videotape of the lost MDR2K IANA-ccTLD meeting (see ourcoverage here and here). The Berkman posse was unable tovideotape the session due to an unexplained last-minute switcheroo ofvenue; but an observer caught the drama -- and dramatic it was -- ontape. A hearty thanks to all who helped us obtain a copy.If roving_readers would like to hear ccTLD luminaries suchas ISOC NZ's Peter Dengate Thrush, nic.vi's Peter de Blanc, and Nominet MD Willie Black giving theICANN staffers' sophistry a thorough trashing, the audio is nowavailable in MP3 format here (four files, 23MBtotal). Share and enjoy.[Addendum: One roving_reader has suggested making thefour MP3s available via HTTP as well to facilitate streaming. Done. And another roving_readerwith a big heart and bigger pipes has mirrored them at internet.com both as separate MP3 files (1, 2, 3, 4)and as asingle RealAudio stream with minimized background hum. Hats off to bothof you.] [Addendum 2: Simon Higgs has kindly provided another mirror here Hats off to him as well.]Wed Jan 31 07:20:47 EST 2001Your gTLD application fees at workPrecisely in accordance withprophecy, yesterday ICANN's Executive Committee held ateleconference in which the numero-uno item was "Authorizing repaymentof loan" -- that's terse for the outstanding $150,000 loan from Cisco.Unlike MCI/WorldCom, 3Com, and Deutsche Telekom -- all of which haveobligingly deferred repayment until summer or fall -- Cisco wanted itsmoney back by 2 February. ICANN continues to present these loans,which were executed between July and October of 1999, as "one yearunsecured loans" (though the link theyoffer as if to substantiate that claim is to a boilerplate loan agreement); as noted in this space, ICANN's public explanations of the terms of these loans differed remarkably from the disclosures it made to the IRS in its application for 501(c)(3) status.Wed Jan 31 07:19:00 EST 2001Wrights and rongs [updated]The end of the month is as good a time as any for theroving_reporter to set an example for our fine friends at ICANNby owning up. We were way off with ourspeculations about Don Heath, which one very well-informedroving_reader dismissed as a "conspiracy theory." We chafed atthat description; it chafed back; we lost. Then again, otherwell-informed sources noted that ICANNauts were publicly scoffing atour report about Carl Bildt -- thatsomeone so prominent would never take a job at ICANN. Heh.In every case, we hasten to thank our sources and correspondents:it's you what keep us honest.[Addendum: The roving_reporter seems to have beenwrong about being wrong about Heath, which is to say he was rightabout Heath: rumor has it that ISOC is nominating him for a seaton ICANN's board.]Mon Jan 29 16:08:36 EST 2001I'm blogging as fast as I canWell, not really...but no way can the roving_reporter keepup with Bret Fausett's ICANN blog, whichhas quickly become the preeminent source of timely news aboutthe activities of ICANN and its alphabeticalisticalinfrastructure-cum-suburban sprawl of working groups, supporting orgs,committees, constituencies, and divers other bureaucratic chinoiserie.Fausett is doing what ICANN, what with its soporific mantra about"openness" and "transparency," should have been doing all along:maintaining a fast and accurate log of their doings, peppered withlinks to primary sources. Had ICANN done so, though, they likelywouldn't have lasted as long as they have -- which may make clear whythey've chosen instead to dole out nanospoonfuls of legalisticboilerplate in the form of press releases, spiced up with the very occasional morsel of "correspondence." And an alarmingamount of that on Friday afternoons, no less.Note that ICANN is now hiring a "PublicAffairs and Communications Director." And a "Policy Analyst," too.Given that each of these jobs pays $40-80K per year, that's aninteresting move because ICANN's budget for FY2000-2001 line-itemed $1,611,000 for "personnel" -- only $11K morethan the $1,600,000 line-itemed for "executive and staff compensation"in the FY1999-2000 budget. With associated costs, these new positions couldrun ICANN a cool $150-250K/year easy. Now, where did ICANN get thatkind of money after they drew up the budget on 6 June? Surely not fromthe ccTLDs, whose admirable recalcitrance reduced ICANN'srevenues by a substantial chunk of $1,355,000.And certainly not from gTLD registrar contributions, which haveflatlined at $535K/Q (1999 listing are here,2000 FQ1 is here).The roving_reporter bets it came, in accordance with prophesy, from thesurplus revenues drawn from new gTLD application fee. If that'scorrect, then ICANN's willingness to commit some of that windfall toan ongoing expense may suggest that new rounds of gTLD applicationswill be coming in the foreseeable future. And it also suggests that theirpublic budgets, like their public announcements, are but a veneer. If onlythe excellent Mr. Fausett had access to the financial gruesomes as well.Not that we'd really wish such a fate on him, mind you...Sun Jan 21 11:56:30 EST 2001Poor guy versus multinational cultDutch columnist and anti-$cientology activist KarinSpaink has published someremarkable accounts of the appeals trial of Scientology versus[Zenon] Panoussis -- her partner's appeal of a Swedish court's1998 ruling in thecult's favor. That ruling awarded the Co$ a measly US$2,000 in"damages" incurred when Panoussis publicly posted some Co$ copyrighted"religious" twaddle on the net. Unfortunately, the court also awardedthe Co$ a more formidable US$150,000 in legal fees; Panoussis has beenall but penniless since, because the Co$ has garnished his wages in --in our opinion -- its ongoing effort to destroy him. The Co$ hadasked the court to force Panoussis to pony up $2 million inlegal fees.The spectacular battles on the net between the Co$ and itsopponents established the framework for many subsequent abuses of"intellectual property" claims to silence critics of corporate andpolitical activities.Sat Jan 20 13:34:50 EST 2001Hawaii 2.0Total Telecom reportsthat ICANN Maximum Leader Mike Roberts, in a talk at the twenty-thirdPacific Telecommunications Council conference, broached two of ICANN'smore delicate subjects: "multilingual" DNS -- that is, domain namesencoded in ways more suited to orthographies around the world thanASCII's C-rationapproach (i.e., A-Z, 0-9, and "-") -- and ICANN's relationship to theccTLDs.Those two subjects are becoming intertwined like lovers in Oshima'sRealm of theSenses, but not for any particularly good reason. It's mostlyattributable to ICANN's clix Americana worldview, wherein allthings un-American get lumped together under "miscellaneous" ("thesignpost of ignorance" as MarcelMauss put it) -- as expressed, for example, in the organizationaldichotomy within ICANN between the gTLD Registry "Constituency"(one member:VeriSign Global Registry Services, née NSI) and the ccTLD Registries Constituency(approximately 244members).The roving_reporter has dealt with ICANN vis-à-visthe ccTLDs in detail, but he has strenuously avoided plunging into thekaleidoscopic world of multilingual DNS. Oh well -- here goes... In January 2000, Nunames, thecommercially oriented ccTLD registrar for Niue's ".nu", announced amultilingual test, but -- a minor detail -- didn't specify whichcharacter encoding standard their extended system would use. There aremany, e.g., DOS Codepage 850, Macintosh, ISO-Latin-1, Unicode, Unicode/UTF-8.(At the time, we notedin our sadly neglected Bitbucketcolumn on Telepolis thatwe were "eager to see a California judge of Latin descent rule onwhether Ámázóñ.nu is a trademark infringement").Although Nunames' experiment didn't go far, a few similar, scatteredefforts followed. Since those halcyon days, though, the situation hasbecome more complex -- specifically, it has become more overtlypolitical.In November, with a nodfrom ICANN, Verisign GlobalRegistry Services (VGRS) -- the M&Aed registry half ofex-NSI, as distinct from the registrar half of the split (seeICANN's summary)-- announced a "testbed"involving Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. This wassignificant, because it omitted other Asian languages (Thai and Khmer,forexample) whose orthography is covered in Unicode/UTF-8. Instead ofdoing something sensible and truly international -- like workingfairly and squarely within the IETF's developing InternationalizedDomain Name (IDN) framework, or collaborating with the remarkablyinternational Multilingual InternetNames Consortium (MINC) -- VGRS jumped the gun by adopting thebackwards-compatible RACE(Row-based ASCII-Compatible Encoding) kludge, which takes Ginsu knives to the bitstream:slicing, dicing, and otherwise mungeing 7-bit ASCII intoUTF-compatible encodings.Why did VGRS do this? Well, money^W I mean marketingstrategies -- no doubt based (generally) on the West's centuries-olddelusional dream of "opening" the fabled markets of Asia to theirwarez^Hs, and also based (specifically) on the perceived need torespond "at internet speed" to certain trends revealed in theirstatistical analyses of domain registrations (ZDNet Asia's coverage ofVGRS's surprising statscan be found here).But more important than the origins of VGRS's actions are theconsequences; and, as roving_readers surely know by now, in theN-dimensional looking-glass world of the politics of DNS, tend to berefractory indeed.The most obvious immediate result (brought to our attention by Brock Meeks)was a sudden surge of new domains that when rendered in ASCIIread as bq--3bp25d3prp5yabi.com, bq--3b2tkw2qkvdf5fy.org,bq--3bixctvloc4q.com, bq--gdpkjl7nxxk4rkx42wr3s.net, and so on. The"bq--" prefix marks these domains as "multilingual." Whetherregistered trademark-holders like BBQ-World of Reno, Nevada, whichcould pull a QVC, willappreciate the complexity of the situation is another story; and British Quizzes could have something tosay about it, too (but only according to the ludicrous logic thatfetishizes "consumer confusion").The more pressing result was that the VGRS's multilingualinitiative offended China's Middle Kingdom sensibilities In a Big Wayand elicited a ballistic response. Hu Qiheng, thedirector of the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), said: [T]he U.S. government has no right to authorize any company to manage Chinese domain names with Chinese characters. A company shouldn't be allowed to provide Chinese domain name registration services in China without the approval of the Chinese government.While the roving_reporter isn't especially sympathetic whenit comes to China'sinternet-related policies (though the issues are morecomplex than most net-heads like to admit), he can only imaginethe orgy of xenophobic ravingthat would greet any unilaterally declared Chinese plan to sell andregulate American things according to Chinese culturalattitudes (like software,say). A certain circumspection in these matters is warranted, becausein addition to being national these issues are also cultural.Thus, CNNIC's director also noted -- correctly -- that [r]elated Chinese departments have protested to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that Chinese-character domain names are quite different from the ASCII (English) ones, since they have unique...cultural and historic implicationsAnyone old enough to grok the roving_reporter's labors oflove will surely remember that ideas like "branding," which of latehave been imbued with pretensions approaching theological dimensions,are really only a few years old -- and, as such, necessarily areculturally and historically specific. The very existence ofICANN's UDRP is itself a clear testament to the fact that theASCII-compatible world can barely manage to sort these questions out(hell, cities like Dallas andeven towns like Salinascan't); but, this reign of confusion notwithstanding, the idea thatAsian-language (i.e., Asian-cultural and -historical) domains shouldbe subject to the keystone kourt of ICANN's UDRP globaloney asinterpreted by, say, the likes of NAF arbitrar^Htor JamesCarmody (track record here)...Uh-huh.China's reaction to VGRS's initiative (which seems to have mellowedslightly) suggested that, beyond the multilateral model offeredby the organizing ccTLD movement, ICANN's ham-handed endorsement ofVGRS's multilingual initiative might end up precipitating a new"sphere of influence" approach to the politics of the namespace.ICANN's dark mantra about what will happen if it fails is puffery:what better way to guarantee that gummints get deeply involvedin DNS than by poking them in the eye? That ICANN would expostulatethusly even as it set about trying to undermine the ccTLDs en masse(see our coverage here andhere) with babble about "trilateral relationshipsamong governments, their ccTLD organizations, and ICANN"...it doesn'tlook good.But, in keeping with our rather cheerier Ginsu-kinfi motif --there's more! -- VGRS's RACE-based kludge also seems to haveruffled some feathers at the IETF. On 13 December, AT&T Labs' JohnKlensin published an IETF Internet Draft (draft-klensin-i18n-newclass-00)boldly -- and, in the roving_reporter's opinion,brilliantly -- suggesting that the best solution tomultilingual DNS might be to consign ASCII-constrained cruft to thejunkheap of history by declaring a new ("IN") class of data in DNSrecords which is UTF-8-multilingualized from the get-go. Klensin'sdraft is quite radical, and a must-read; but, forroving_readers too lazy to klick on a link, the upshot of hisdraft is that the installed base of pre-"new-class" software andhardware (including, potentially, ICANN's fetishized root) could bereduced to a legacy system.So now, perhaps, roving_readers will see why theroving_reporter has been so chary of treating these subjects.But back to Generalissimo Roberts, whose remarks in Hawaiiseem to confirm the roving_reporter's assessment of the Chinesedebacle: "[ICANN alone] deciding which version of Chinese will be usedto register domains is an easy way to get fired." (By whom? onewonders.)Roberts also went on to suggest -- unsurprisingly -- that ICANNhopes to impose the UDRP on the ccTLDs, when, according to TotalTelecom, he "hinted" about the "possibility of getting our systemof registration into other countries."If Total Telecom's reportage is accurate, he seems at timesto have taken a rather defensive tone: Also, every citizen on the Net feels they have been empowered to challenge what [ICANN does], and I think we should be able to get on with our jobs without organized undermining of what we're doing.It's good to finally hear a candid assessment from ICANN about justhow much "bottom-up" support it really has.As the ICANNBlog points out, ICANN staff -- possibly including Roberts -- willbe back in Hawaii in less than two weeks for a luau with theccTLDs. A hui hou, d00d. The above material is Copyright © 2000 by t. byfield.The r_r began as a semi-collaborative nym on the <nettime> list, where it worked well; but thepseudonym precluded comments, and there was more to report than wasgood for the list, so now it -- or a mutation of it -- hasresurfaced on TBTF. [ top] TBTFHOME CURRENTISSUE TBTFLOG TABLE OFCONTENTS SEARCHTBTF Copyright © 1994-2000 by Keith Dawson. Commercial use prohibited. May be excerpted, mailed, posted, or linked for non-commercial purposes. Updated 2001-03-01 |
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A | collective | nym | for | commentry, | usually | biting | and | shocking | well | referenced. | | Great | collection | of | news | and | opinion | commentry | by | one | of | the | most | informed | minds | in | ICANN | watching. |
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http://www.tbtf.com/roving_reporter/
The Roving Reporter 2009 January
dvd rental
dvd
A collective nym for commentry, usually biting and shocking well referenced. Great collection of news and opinion commentry by one of the most informed minds in ICANN watching.
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