Re: IETF, ICANN and Whois (Was Re: Last Call: <draft-housley-rfc2050bis-01.txt> (The Internet Numbers Registry System) to Informational RFC)

[Christopher Morrow <[e-mail]>]

Did this LC end?
or stated differently: "What's the status of this draft LC?"

I'm not such a fan of the draft, mostly because it appears to remove
some principles that some RIR folk hold up in their policy discussions
as important... while not having a backstop in said policies to
replace the originals from 2050.

That can be fixed though... provided those communities see fit to keep
the principles in place. Mostly then my 'not such a fan' is a timing
problem I suppose, which is what prompted this LC query.

-chris


On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 10:30 AM, John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>
> --On Tuesday, May 21, 2013 09:42 +0100 Steve Crocker
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> Like the IETF, ICANN is also an open organization.  ICANN
>> meetings are free, and a veritable ocean of documents are
>> published regularly, many in multiple languages to increase
>> availability.
>>
>> ICANN is purposefully organized to include participation from
>> a range of communities, e.g. business, civil society,
>> governments, and the technical community.
>>...
>> The roster of topics active within ICANN at any given time is
>> fully documented and publicized, and I invite anyone who is
>> interested to participate.  We listen to everyone, and we
>> publish tentative results, tentative policies, etc. for
>> everyone to critique.
>
>
> --On Tuesday, May 21, 2013 12:25 +0200 Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> Quite frankly, I used to have the same feeling... until very
>> recently. With Steve at the wheel, things have improved a lot.
>>...
>> Today, it's still not
>> perfect, but you cannot fix a bus by shooting it - work on it
>> instead, to fix it. I believe it's fixable.
>
> Steve and Olivier,
>
> As I think you both know, I've made personal decisions to avoid
> saying what I'm about to say in places as public as the IETF
> list and have been largely successful in that for the last
> decade.  I've been deliberating about the balance of advantages
> and disadvantages of responding to your notes; hence the delay
> in doing so.  I've worked happily and successfully with both of
> you on various Internet issues and have no doubts about either
> your integrity or your commitment to a better Internet, with the
> latter more or less the way the IETF would understand.  That
> shared background and assumptions combined with your very
> optimistic postings seem to call for comment.
>
> Olivier, certainly there has been change at ICANN over the last
> several years.  You comment implies to me that you think things
> are monotonically improving; I don't believe that although I do
> believe that, if one starts from selected examples and times,
> huge improvements are easy to document.   I'll address the issue
> of public input and what happens to it below.
>
> As a fairly trivial example, while issues are publicized (as
> Steve notes), they are publicized on a web site that seems much
> harder to find anything on, unless one is spending enough time
> working on ICANN issues for it to feel familiar with its
> organization, than it was a few years ago.  I recommend trying
> the experiment of pretending you don't know the site and then
> trying to get quickly to information on the status, open issues,
> and decisions already made about any particular substantive
> issue in which you might be interested.
>
> Steve, participation in ICANN is certainly not free, any more
> than participation in the IETF is free.  ICANN doesn't charge a
> meeting registration fee, but its meetings tend to be in more
> exotic places that are more costly to get to and/or stay at than
> IETF's choices (and some of us still whine about the IETF ones,
> especially when IAOC considers "mid $200 range" to be acceptable
> for hotels and when the combination of the IETF meeting
> schedule, associated meetings, and plane connections can easily
> require a six or seven day stay).
>
> My not entirely subjective impression is that participating in
> ICANN, f2f, is considerably more expensive in an average year
> than it is for IETF.   More important, while I think the IETF's
> remote participation mechanisms could still use a lot of
> improvement, they do tend to work and our "decisions on mailing
> lists" rules and provisions for very public appeals and
> responses provide a lot of protection when they don't work.  By
> contrast, ICANN's remote participation mechanisms for meetings
> often don't work (probably an unfortunate side-effect of some of
> the places ICANN chooses to meet) and a very large fraction of
> the key decision-making meetings and discussions don't even
> pretend to be publicly or remotely accessible.
>
> But the more important issue, at least from my perspective, is
> that two things keep reappearing and have either gotten worse or
> remained the same in recent years.  They are:
>
> (1) While ICANN accepts input from anyone who is interested,
> there is very little evidence that any of that input has any
> influence on results unless it comes from a well-established
> constituency group.   There is little evidence that either the
> Board or Staff actually consider any of the public input and
> considerable evidence (from examination of proposals before and
> after the public review) that they do not.  It is also possible
> that they consider all such comments and justifiably conclude
> that all of them are completely bogus or uninformed, but I just
> can't believe that.  That might be less of an issue were those
> established constituency groups really representative of the
> Internet community but, especially in the domain name space, the
> influential groups seems to be entirely those with a vested
> interest in the marketing and sales of domain names.  Even in
> the address space, there is little evidence that anyone but the
> NRO/RIRs and their associated entities can really be heard at a
> level that has an influence on policy.  I'm sure they consider
> their processes adequate to reflect all legitimate input and
> therefore that the closed circle of influence is a good thing;
> perhaps they are right. Consequently, what "bottom up" seems to
> mean in the ICANN environment is that only ICANN-recognized and
> established presumptive representatives of the "bottom" have any
> voice in the system with "that proposal or objection didn't
> arrive via the bottom up process" sometimes being used as an
> excuse to ignore input.
>
> (2) The established mechanism for dealing with a moderately
> contentious issue is to appoint a committee of volunteers to
> study it.  The mechanism for even more contentious or complex
> issues is to appoint many committees either serially or in
> parallel.  Those committees typically produce reports that tend
> to run into the hundreds of pages.  I don't know whether that is
> because they don't have time to write shorter reports or because
> they don't think the subject matter can be covered in more
> concise reports, but the pattern is clear,   When those
> committees cannot agree or discover the the issues are, in fact,
> contentious, they typically recommend the creation of more
> committees.
>
> Those committees are time-consuming enough that their design has
> another effect: only those with a very strong commitment to the
> work and resources to back that commitment up can participate in
> practice.   Those people usually turn out to be those with a
> vested interest in particular results, interests that are
> dominated by those with an organizational interest in buying and
> selling names.  Others who might be willing to invest personal
> resources to participate in the best interests of the Internet
> are typically driven out of active participation in the process,
> if not initially than by the sequence and multitude of
> committees and inability to even figure out where the leverage
> points lie, much less participate everywhere that is necessary.
>
> The many, many years in which one "whois" or "registry database"
> committee followed another, each one addressing somewhat
> overlapping aspects of the issues, but with no ability to get
> any of them to address IDN or "multilingual" registrations in a
> serious way (at least until very recently) is symptomatic of the
> problem but I believe only one example among many.  In the
> meantime, staff (I believe trying sincerely to fill the vacuum)
> charges ahead with their own approaches.  Those approaches end
> up either binding ICANN without even a sign of a legitimate
> policy development process or, because they don't have community
> support, going nowhere after considerable resources have been
> wasted.
>
> The result of the many committees is collections of long and
> complex reports that often avoid asking, much less answering,
> actual critical questions.  Because of the length, number, and
> complexity of the reports almost no one actually reads them,
> much less gets a complete picture of the systems and issues
> involved.  Staff apparently sees their mandate in organizing,
> overseeing, and presenting the resulting studies as "how do we
> make this work and minimize the risks".  A result is that one of
> the questions that rarely or never gets asked, especially if
> there is a loud or well-resourced constituency for some action,
> is whether the action is a good idea for the Internet at all
> rather than how to do it and mitigate the damage.
>
> The Board doesn't seem to be inclined and able to fix any of
> this.  I don't know whether that is because too much of its
> composition is the wrong people with the wrong knowledge and
> skills, it isn't getting adequate information or an adequate and
> comprehensive understanding of the issues about which it is
> supposedly setting directions and policies, because it has come
> to care more about ICANN's success (however measured) than that
> of the Internet, of for other reasons.  However, the result
> seems to be that the same patterns keep repeating themselves
> years after year with little real change.
>
> I'm not at all sure how to fix these problems, at least without
> a reorganization of ICANN that is at least as significant as the
> 2.0 one.  But I'm fairly sure that the sort of complacency that
> I interpret from the notes partially quoted above is an
> impediment to even serious thinking about the issues.
>
> I hope there is some way to do better in the future.
>
> best regards,
>     john
>