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

On torsdag, apr 3, 2003, at 07:03 Europe/Stockholm, Rob Austein wrote:


At Wed, 02 Apr 2003 18:40:55 -0500, Leslie Daigle wrote:

I believe this pertains to ICANN's proposal:

http://www.icann.org/general/crada-report-summary-14mar03.htm

(Note section C.3).  We've been asked if the IAB is going to make
a statement about this proposal.

FYI, RSSAC was pretty much out of the loop on this, and has not even
seen the full report (of which this is a santized excerpt).  Louis
Touton's explanation boils down to "hey, we asked RSSAC to help write
this, RSSAC did a bit of work on the first draft then went lame on us,
we had deadlines to meet, so we finished it without RSSAC's help."

I have not figured out whether RSSAC or ICANN is more at fault here
(the competition is keen).
My findings when I stirred up some dust around this report between april and sept 2002, is that DoC asked some questions to ICANN 2 years ago (during year 2000). The intent from DoC was that RSSAC should write a report, of which some parts could be classified confidential if the RSSAC so wanted.

After 2 years, DoC started spring of 2002 (just before Karen left) push harder and ask where this report was. It was at that point clear that RSSAC have not understood how important this report was for DoC. In reality, when countries in the world (non-US) and ITU asked about "the stability of the DNS", DoC protected themselves by saying "a report was coming from the root server operators". Something RSSAC had not understood. Partly (possibly) because the communication was between DoC and RSSAC via ICANN.

During summer of 2002, some part of a document was written, and fall of 2002 (when Cathy had taken over) a 7 page preliminary report was submitted. I saw it, and it could clearly have been an article in whatever Internet paper out there. Basically, it didn't cut it.

After more work from friendly people which want DoC and RSSAC to work well together, Cathy started to meet with RSSAC in Atlanta, and finally I think RSSAC understood what the problem was, and what kind of report was to be written. At the same time Rob was added to RSSAC list etc etc, and he knows the rest.

My view is that when finally RSSAC understood what was to be created, and DoC started talk with RSSAC, ICANN go somewhere else. (I presume it was the choice of Louis, as Rob says, to go somewhere else)

That was not good.

If non-root-server-people was to write something, _THEY_ should have asked for help from some technical writer. Not ICANN. A bug I think (and I have said so to friends in RSSAC which happened to live in Stockholm...).

paf