Re: [Internetgovtech] US Government response to the European Commission statement

[Eric Brunner-Williams <[e-mail]>]

No Hat.

My two beads worth is that three decades ago, when Jon Postel wanted to 
respond to the growth of registrations, Jon erred in missing the fact 
that network prefixes associated with urban areas provided addresses to 
the overwhelming majority of resources associated with persistent 
mnemonics. I discussed with Jon the absence of accommodation in 
iso3166-1 for stateless populations directly after the publication of 
rfc1591, and I too erred in not realizing that urban density offered an 
alternative to territorial jurisdiction when attempting to scale the 
"assignments czar" functions to the decline in network adapter prices.

Overlooking the vested interest of the then-monopoly dns operator, now 
merely the operator with 85% market share, it is difficult to find a 
rational interest in the policy of restricting access by stateless 
populations to the US DoC root. The responsibility for this policy 
appears to lie squarely with "government". While I spoke with Jon, and 
others spoke with Michael St. Johns, and our concerns were partially 
addressed by the addition of the NSN SLD to the US ccTLD, the concerns 
of Catalan speakers were not addressed until 2004, and the concerns of 
some autonomous regions, chiefly in Europe, have only just been 
addressed, at exceptional fee and contractual encumbrances, the concerns 
of populations such as the European Rom and European speakers of Yiddish 
and Arabic remain frustrated by the exclusive access claims of national 
governments.

So, every request by government(s), of cities, urban agglomerations, of 
indigenous polities, linguistic and cultural communities, even iso3166-3 
regions, for access, as public governments to the US DoC root, present a 
problem in "internet governance" created by "government" and maintained 
to the present by "governments". It would be nice if government fixed 
this government-caused problem in "internet governance" by recourse to 
less absurd means than tasking a private contractor to treat these as 
speculative, for-profit exploits.

Now the second bead.

The "how many {sociologists,...} participate in IETF processes?" laundry 
list manages to miss one area of work by "governments" which might have, 
and still may, inform the IETF.  Governments have been quite successful 
in establishing language encoding standards in which text data is 
created, transmitted, and stored. One government, and its contractor, 
chose one national standard for all text-associated network addressable 
resources, restricting script choices to US-ASCII, and encodings over 
US-ASCII, for glyphs present in a repertoire produced by an consortium 
of printer vendors. At no point in time have "governments" initiated 
work necessary to reconcile multiple, diverse character set standards, 
with a single resource location mechanism, nor has the IRTF followed up 
on the recommendation of the IAB Character Set Workshop of April, 1997, 
"to create a research group to explore the open issues of character sets 
on the Internet ".

The observation has been made frequently, and by many, that language is 
an "internet governance" issue, and in fact, the need for correct 
resolution of resources "named" in the Han script, encoded in UTF-8, 
lead to the illumination of a second root server constellation, leading 
immediately to a consistency of publications problem -- a first order 
problem in "internet governance", yet both "governments" and "the 
technical community" treat this as a solved problem, overlooking the 
distinction between the corpus of text associated with resources, and 
the corpora of texts which comprise text resources.

 From my perspective there are actual failures of both "government" and 
"the technical community" to conduct "internet governance" effectively, 
for which remedial work would be of measurable utility.

Eric Brunner-Williams
Eugene, Oregon
former-hats=={sri, .biz/.us co-author, .cat co-author, cto core, primary 
author, xpg1, xpg4.2 (single unix standard), {solaris|hp-ux} i18n/l10n 
implementor, etc.}