Re: Gen-ART review of draft-bundesbank-eurosystem-namespace-02

[[e-mail] (Dale R. Worley)]

> From: [e-mail]
> Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2013 15:38:33 +0100
> Cc: [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail]

> We have been surprised by your concerns regarding the application for a
> Formal URN Namespace, which we'd have expected being raised by someone
> during the two stages of URN-NID Expert Review the draft has undergone
> since August 2013.  Apparently, the URN experts
> active on the urn-nid list did not share your concerns.

I believe that you do not fully grasp the social dynamics -- the
de-facto constitution -- of the IETF.  In this instance, the "URN
experts" perform one round of evaluation of the proposal, from their
particular point of view.  But the approval of the IETF as a whole for
URN matters is not *delegated* to the URN experts; the IETF as a whole
must independently achieve consensus that this is a desirable
proposal.

In regard to the objections raised regarding the proposed namespace, I
will extract a portion of your message and then expand on it in a way
that I think expresses your intention, but in a way that more directly
addresses the objections:

> Admittedly, it is true that, at the first stage of usage of the
> 'eurosystem' namespace, the mass production use of the assigned URNs will
> be contained in messages carried in cryptographic digital envelopes or
> Vitual Private Networks.  However, the transparency requirements (needed
> for establishing and maintaining public trust into the subject financial
> transaction systems), open software development processes, and software
> deployment require the origin and authority for the URNs to be easily
> identified, and the URNs to be resolved on the public Internet.

What it seems to me that you are saying is that in the ordinary usage
of these URNs, they will be confined to particular VPNs that are
tightly associated with the Eurosystem.  (Of course, the usage may be
expanded in the future.)  But even initially, there are expected to be
situations where, at least for particular URNs and particular messages
containing those URNs, it is necessary to be able to identify in much
more public contexts that the URNs have particular defined
(standardized) meanings.

At least, this is the meaning I attribute to your use of
"transparency": that various facts can be established *to outsiders*.

And if it is true that the meanings of these URNs must be provable to
outsiders, outsiders who at least partially operate on the global
Internet, then this is a reason to establish a formal registration of
the URN namespace.

Dale