The Internet Society (ISOC) seeks a maximum of three highly qualified individuals to serve on the Board of Directors of the Public Interest Registry (PIR) for the period 2008-2010. PIR’s business is managing an international registry of .org domain names. The Board meets in person 3-4 times per year. The time commitment is approximately 14-18 full days per year plus additional phone calls and e-mail.

Qualifications sought include:

• Demonstrated business acumen with significant entrepreneurial, non-commercial and/or marketing skills;
• understanding and engagement in the retail domain name space;
• known contributor to the ICANN processes;
• financial literacy;
• expertise in the application of Internet technologies to support non-commercial organizations; and
• experience with the operation and policies of TLD registries.

Global diversity in candidates is desired.
Please forward a statement of interest and qualifications, three references, and a curriculum vitae highlighting relevant experience, expertise, and contact information to:

Lynn St. Amour, President and CEO, Internet Society
Email: pir-nomcomm@ISOC.org.
Please submit materials in attached documents (pdf, .doc, .txt)

For full consideration, please apply by June 11th, 2007. Applications will be evaluated as they are received.

Desired Characteristics of Board Members

Time Commitment

PIR Board Members are required to dedicate a significant amount of time and this should be carefully vetted with new board members. A firm commitment must be in place to attend meetings in person as it is imperative that a small board have full participation.

Board Meetings: four per year, 1.5 days in length plus travel time. One in Reston, VA in January and the other three collocated with ICANN meetings around the world.

Strategic Planning Retreat: one per year, generally 3 days plus travel time, can be anywhere in the world.
Advisory Council Meeting: one per year, generally 3 days in the fall plus travel time, can be anywhere in the world.
Conference calls: as needed, currently weekly.
Email correspondence: daily.

Because the board is intentionally small, it is also important for the board members to seriously consider their role as an officer. Currently, we have five elected officer positions: Chair, Vice-Chair, Treasurer, Secretary, and Assistant Secretary, two of which will be filled with non-board members.

Skills

The priority skills are as follows:

General business acumen with either significant entrepreneurial, non-profit and/or marketing (not sales) skills
Known as a contributor in ICANN – Understanding and engagement in the retail domain name space (e.g. a Pindar equivalent)
Additional useful skills are:

Long term strategic thinker
Financial acumen; PIR is a $40M/yr. enterprise
Familiarity with the non-commercial enterprise world
Geographical diversity
Please also note that without current exposure/involvement with the highly volatile name space business arena, it will take board member 6-12 months to get up-to-speed. With two new members next year, it will be crucial to make sure at least one new member is actively engaged in the name space arena.

Personal Qualities of a Board Member

The personal qualitites of a board member are important to a high-functioning small board:

High ethical standards/integrity
Motivator
Strong communication skills
Passionate and energetic
Collaborative and consensus builder

PIR – Do Well, Do Right, Do Good

PIR

The Public Interest Registry is the Internet domain registry for all .ORG Top Level Domains. PIR has a particular focus on acting in the public interest. Working together with Afilias, its business partner and back-end provider, PIR seeks to:

Do Well – PIR performs its role as a registry well, serving its registrars and the users of .org names with predictable, reliable, and efficient registration services and name resolution. It seeks to meet and exceed the requirements set by ICANN for registry operation and meet or exceed the expectations of its registrars and the public who use .org names. In this respect, PIR seeks to be an exemplary registry in its operations. PIR is a serious business entity seeking to earn the maximum surplus possible consistent with its other missions below and by doing so, provide the funding that makes the other missions possible.

Do Right – PIR has a particular focus in the Internet name space to envision, develop consensus around, and lead in the implementation of registry and namespace policies that serve the wider interests of registrants and the Internet and therefore its stability as a whole. In this respect, PIR acts in the public interest and seeks to be an exemplary registry in its policies and values.

Do Good – The .org namespace is the natural home of non-commercial organizations on the Internet. PIR has a special role in fostering effective and efficient use of the Internet by non-commercial organizations, and seeks to leverage the benefits non-commercial organizations can provide to society by helping them make innovative and constructive uses of the Internet. In this respect, PIR acts in the public interest and wishes to magnify the good that these non-commercial organizations can provide to society. PIR also seeks to serve the broader goals of Internet education, standards development, and Internet policy stewardship represented by the Internet Society, and uses the vast majority of its surplus to serve the public interest in the Internet in this way.

For the election of Trustees by Chapters, there were four candidates and a total of 56 out of 76 (73%) possible ballots. The percentage of chapters participating was much greater than last year.

One position is to be filled for a three year term. In addition, one additional position opened up this year due to an early vacancy. After a complete count, the results are:

• Patrick Vande Walle
• Dr. Alejandro Pisanty

As such, Patrick Vande Walle is elected to a new three year term and Dr.Alejandro Pisanty is elected to fill the vacancy for the coming year.

For the election of Trustees by Organization Members, there were had four candidatesand total of 52 of 78 (67%) possible ballots. The percentage of organizational members participating was much greater than last year. After a complete count, factoring in membership-level weighting, the results are:

• Desiree Miloshevic
• Dr. Hiroshi Esaki

As such, Desiree Miloshevic and Dr. Hiroshi Esaki are elected for three year terms.

In a separate process, the IETF has selected Ted Hardie to serve for a three year term.

At long last, the incumbent operator, P&T, has upgraded its ADSL infrastructure to the ADSL2+ standard. As a result, download speeds now range from 2 to 15 Mbits/s.  This is  most welcome, as  it moves Luxembourg back into the top 30 leading countries with broadband access. The icing on the cake is that this is being done with no additional subscription fees.

Many competing ISPs (Visual Online, Luxembourg Online, Alternet, Tele2)  use the P&T infrastructure. Hence , their offers have been adapted, too. I guess it will only take weeks before the competing infrastructure provider, Cegecom, will offer the same speeds, too.

A few months ago, the Luxembourg chapter of ISOC launched a survey among the Internet users. The main finding was that the users were unhappy with the slowish speed of their “broadband” connection. While I would not dare to say that this report changed the landscape, I think it nevertheless contributed to speed up the deployment of the new DSLAMs.

From discussions we had with members of the Luxembourg ISOC chapter, it appears that ISPs over here do a terrible job at offering a good Usenet service. Some people complained that they had to buy the service elsewhere. Others just gave up because their ISP was not carrying the groups they wished and offered a very limited choice.

Strange, because offering good Usenet service is neither difficult  nor expensive. In less than 2 weeks, we have been able to offer to our members a good service, with multiple peers, all of which do it for free. How come a volunteer not-for-profit can do what a commercial ISP cannot ?
This is quite typical of the mostly general attitude of ISPs over here, which is along the lines of “Pay your subscription and don’t complain”.

The last Usenet group about ISOC has been deleted today. The times they are a changin’

The Internet Society yesterday read a very direct, unambiguous statement on the role of the USG in the ICANN process. Some excerpts:

Finally, as the MOU has become a symbol internationally of US control over the DNS, it can be argued that the MOU, which was originally designed to support and shore up ICANN in its early days, is now actually hampering ICANN’s continued development and their legitimacy in the eyes of many.

ISOC believes a clear unambiguous signal needs to be made internationally that we are entering a new phase and taking steps to move to the private sector model per the original vision of the US Government.

I heard a zillion times that ISOC was the USG’s best friend. I hope this will definitively show it is untrue.

The Public Interest Registry (PIR) announced today the appointment of
seven new Worldwide Advisory Council members and a new representative
from the ICANN Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) to fill
expiring term open seats. New members include:

• Maarten Botterman: Europe (RAND Corporation)
• Hans Peter Dittler: Europe (Internet Society)
• Michael Mann: North America (Grassroots.ORG)
• Sebastian Ricciardi: South America (Jauregui & Assoc.)
• Sadiq Hussain: Asia (Majan University College)
• Angela Stuber: North America (Ohio Community Computing Network)
• Jaechul Sir: Asia Pacific (Korea NIC)
• Frannie Wellings (NCUC Representative)

I just got this link from Jordi Palet Martinez.

ISOC and The IPv6 Portal organize a half day IPv6 workshop in Istanbul, next Friday 28th, after the RIPE meeting.

The target audience is engineers, ICT managers, software developers and public sector. It is expected that the participants have some IPv4 knowledge in order to take bigger advantage of the workshop.

The goal of the workshop will be to introduce IPv6 from a theoretical point of view, and make some hands-on practices with Windows XP. Information about other operating systems will be also provided. The workshop will also give some basic ideas about how to enable IPv6 in ISP and enterprise networks. As a practical exercise, the participants will be able to present their own network cases and work on possible transition paths for those cases. It is expected that the participants bring their own laptops with XP SP2 to take further advantage of the hands-on part.

What is great about this initiative it that it addresses what matters most, ie how do you actually set up IPv6 in a real production environment. This is most welcome. The deployment of IPv6 has been slowed down by the fact that it still appears to be working in the lab only and not quite ready for mass deployment. From an IETF outsider’s point of view, it looks like they are still working on the specs. ‘IPv6 Test beds’ are being advertised. But again, most IT managers will consider that what is still at the test stage is not production ready.
On the software side, the lack of simple how-to documents and up to date configurations are also confusing users. As an example, there is no GUI in Windows XP to configure IPv6. You need to revert to obscure ‘netsh’ commands to make it work.
On a Linux Redhat 4 box, although you are offered to configure IPv6 at installation time, it does not define the default route. You end up with an unusable IPv6 config, unless you make the adjustments yourself.

(tip: ip -6 route add 2000::/3 via replace_this_with_your_ipv6_default_gateway).

In case you have not noticed, this blog is reachable through IPv6. Try ‘dig patrick.vande-walle.eu AAAA‘ (if you have a real operating system, of course )

It seems like every ICANN board member needs to run a blog these days. Veni Markovski has started his own one.

Worth reading and funny, too. These are David W. Maher’s memoirs from his early days in the Internet governance world. David was the former VP Public Policy of ISOC. He is now Senior Vice President, Law and Policy of PIR.

This is no diplomatic talk. Maher talks frankly about Postel (“God”), Cerf, Magaziner and how the Clinton administration managed to ignore the IAHC in favour of of its creation, ICANN.

Mr. Fred Baker, chair of the Internet Society (ISOC, http://www.isoc.org), signed on February 11th, in Utrecht, Netherlands, the certificate that allows the legal incorporation of ISOC European Chapters Coordinating Council (ISOC-ECC, http://www.isoc-ecc.org), as well as it allows the use of ISOC’s name and logo.

That’s very good news. The European Internet users community is finally organizing. Read the full press release here.

The IETF has written a letter to NTIA regarding the RFI for IANA services. The current contract with ICANN expires this month.

The IETF suggests “the DoC separate the technical parameter assignment function (as corrected above) from the other two functions since that is carried out for and at the direction of the IETF.” and transfer these under the IETF/ISOC umbrella. This obviously makes a lot of sense. Protocol numbering is not a hot political issue and is best kept outside the  political storms.

However, if the DoC answer is negative, the other approach would be to have an unilateral decision by the IETF/IAB to end its agreement with the IANA and set up a new numbering secretariat for its own purposes.

An interesting reading is the opinion of the US General Accounting Office: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/og00033r.pdf . This is already six years old, but still very meaningful.

Some excerpts:
“It is unclear whether the Department has the authority to transfer control of the authoritative root server to ICANN. [...] it is unclear if the Department has the requisite authority to effect such a transfer.”

“The delegation from an agency to a private party is sometimes referred to as the doctrine of subdelegation, with the original delegation between Congress and the agency. [...] Here, Congress has never delegated responsibility to manage the domain name system to any federal agency.”

The above sentences applied to the root zone file editing process. We should see if it also applies to the IANA functions. As we know, the DoC never took this into consideration and continued its process of contracting with ICANN and Verisign. But at least, they know their position and authority could be legally challenged.

The NTIA is requesting information from potential bidders to perform the IANA tasks. The IANA contract expires at the end of March 2006. The timeframe is only surprising in that this should have happened earlier.
The IANA function of ICANN is the part that has been the less crontroversal, with the notable exception of some key missing cctld reports. We should keep in mind that the IANA is responsible for a lot more than just country code allocation in the DNS. It manages the very critical IP address space. It is also in charge of keeping and allocating many other things from TCP and UDP port numbers to SNMP entreprise UIDs. As such, the IANA is the numbering secretariat of the IETF. In the end, it should return where it belongs, ie under the ISOC/IETF umbrella.

But the one main question of course is if the DoC is allowed to do what it does at all. Does the US government “own” the Internet ? Is there an undisputed proof of ownership ? An international treaty granting this right to the US government ?
If not, it is not in a position to launch such a process on a good it does not own.

Today, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Society (ISOC) celebrate the 20th anniversary of the IETF, the world’s leading Internet standards development body.The first IETF meeting was held on the afternoon of January 16, 1986, in San Diego, California. As a community-driven activity the IETF went on to pioneer a unique, open process for standards development. Open to all, and based on principles such as “rough consensus and running code”, the IETF has enabled the development of standards that have supported every aspect of the Internet’s phenomenal growth.

“The IETF is unique,” said Brian Carpenter, IETF Chair. “Unlike other standards bodies, there is very little in the way of formal hierarchy and there are no membership requirements or fees. The IETF welcomes broad participation by anyone interested in the future technical evolution and stability of the Internet – and IETF standards are available to all, without charge.”

“The success of the IETF has largely been due to a pragmatic, consensus-based approach to technology standards development,” noted Lynn St. Amour, President and CEO of the Internet Society (ISOC). “Many of the principles of cooperation and collaboration that were developed in the IETF are now being successfully applied in other global forums. ISOC is proud to be associated with the IETF – we value its members’ accomplishments over the last 20 years and look forward to celebrating these achievements over the course of 2006.”

I have often argued both on this blog and in live discussions that spam is a non-issue, which could be addressed by the ISP industry if it really wanted to. All the tools are there. A free software like SpamCannibal could do the job for low traffic operations. For ISPs, they could link their routers to DNS backlists and drop packets on port 25 from rogue ISP IP addresses or AS’es. Once the legitimate customer of ISP X will start complaining that their e-mail are being rejected on a massive scale and threaten to switch providers, be sure that ISP X will effectively stop hosting spam operations.

Only the political/economical willingness is missing. Right now, ISPs are just making lots of $$$ out of spam. That’s selling bandwidth after all. This is what you get when an industry focuses on short term profits rather than societal/ethical behaviour. Or customers could begin to sue their connectivity provider and ask for compensation for damage. After all, spam is costing billions of dollars each year to individuals and companies, in terms of lost time and resources. Saying that the carrier is neutral and is not responsible for carrying spam is unresponsible.
If the industry does not want to auto-regulate itself and really enforce its AUPs, one day or another governemnts will have to threaten them with fines is they continue to carry spammers on their network. So, spam issues, in the WSIS context, is just a smoke screen to divert us from real issues, ie unilateral political control on key Internet resources. But spam is a popular subject, as everyone is facing it. It makes good headlines in the popular press.

In the latest comments it has submitted to the Chair of the PrepCom, ISOC has clarified its position on the control of the root zone file by the US government. It suggests that: " the internationalization of this responsibility is desirable when stakeholders can be sure that such internationalization strengthens the security, stability and continuity of the Internet, while ensuring its openness".   Those dismissing ISOC because it would be USG-aligned will have to think twice in the future.

The recent move of the DoC regarding .XXX is symptomatic that its goals are not the ones it advertises. In the case of the root zone file, The DoC should have the role of a guardian angel, an external witness that the requested changes are not a threat to the stability of the DNS. Obviously, this was not the case. The DoC has now injected the moral and political values of the most conservative part of the Republican administration in what should be a purely technical process. Many countries are not going to buy that.

The ISOC ambassadors at WSIS PrepCom 3 are blogging full steam at http://geneva.isoc.org/blogs/wsis/. The ambassadors were recruited within the ISOC membership. They come from all over the world and are attending PrepCom3, with the goal of propagating the views of ISOC in all circles and constituencies.

According to this news on Businesswire, Vint Cerf, the ICANN Chairman, is leaving MCI, where he has been working for a long time to join Google.

The Google press release says Cerf will be “Chief Internet Evangelist”, whatever that means.

Oh and by the way, if you take a look at Vint’s official picture on the Google site, you will notice he wears an ISOC pin on his jacket. This is more apparent on the hi-res TIFF version.

The Internet Society has been participating in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) http://www.itu.int/wsis/ and will participate in the next meeting in Tunis this coming November.

The Summit has a PrepCom coming up in September and ISOC intends to continue its efforts to inform WSIS and related efforts and so will participate in the coming PrepCom. To do so most effectively, we encourage all members to make their views on this subject known. You can do this here at: http://geneva.isoc.org/surveys/index.php?sid=3.

The transcript of the morning session of the WGIG is available here . It includes some interesting comments on ICANN from Paul Twomey.
Stay tuned for more.

The afternoon session is also online.