Re: [Ianaplan] Our impossible job, was Where we're at/going forward

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

Hi John,

On 8/25/15 11:42 PM, John Levine wrote:
> The IETF interacts indirectly with IANA via the names world in lots of
> ways.  The obvious recent example is the discussion about .onion and
> other non-DNS name use, but there are technical stability issues for
> changes to top level records (.google asked for a wildcard last year),
> for DNSSEC (will we ever invent a workable way to provision it) and
> all of the various ways to bundle names that are semantically related,
> a problem that the marketing community appears to believe is trivial,
> but that we have found intractable.

Indeed, and you haven't even touched on Unicode.

>   So far we've managed to dodge the
> bullets, but that seems to me largely due to the moral suasion that we
> have over ICANN, due in no small part to personal relationships with
> leaders who, although vigorous, are not immortal.

Yes.
>
> So if we're going to make a statement about the combined proposal, we
> need to make it clear that we endorse the parameter parts and make no
> statement either way about the rest of it.  If the press spins that as
> saying the IETF doesn't endorse the names PTI, they wouldn't be wrong.

The problem is that you continue to treat this proposal as three.  It's
not.  It's one integrated proposal.  Further, a binary decision will
eventually be made.  Ours is as follows: do we support it or not, and
why or why not?  Does the ICG have more information if we simply support
only our portion of the proposal?  I would say not.  They gain a little
information if we tell them that they haven't cocked it up.  But a very
little more.  We have the opportunity to say more.  If we pass on that
opportunity, the decision will be ceded to others; and we may not like
their view or their goals at all.

Thus we perform a risk analysis.  Are the risks of not supporting the
proposal outweighed by the risks of supporting it?  Note "it" and not
"them".

Eliot