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.