Re: U.S. Homeland Security dept, ICANN, and the root servers

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>]

fwiw, what I have been told is that no change to the root zone is ever done 
without the change request having been signed by a PGP key that is held by 
the US DoC; they, in turn, don't sign off on anything unless it arrives 
there signed with an ICANN-held PGP key.

And it's been that way (or equivalents thereof) every single day since Jon 
Postel stopped being solely responsible.

My understanding.

And no, I don't think the IAB-as-IAB needs to wade into this swamp; this is 
most definitely a political issue - the technical issue is that there needs 
to be one authoritative root zone file, and that everyone needs to be clear 
about which one that is, and they *are* doing that.

                   Harald

--On onsdag, april 02, 2003 16:31:27 -0800 Sally Floyd <floyd@icir.org> 
wrote:

> > I have a problem in principle with all root-zone changes needing to be
> > approved by the US Department of Commerce.
> Yep, me too.
>
> (Does the U.S. government really plan to try to take back parts of
> a role that it has long given up, of responsibility for the global
> Internet infrastructure?  It would be distressing if the IAB ended
> up with no choice but to wade more deeply into the non-IETF-IANA
> portion of the ICANN morass...)
>
> - Sally