greg -- you may be right.
Yet if you are right and with an ICANN failure all big business would
have to do would be to go to Congress for a quick and easy fix, then
I ask what are Cerf and Patrick afraid of? Dave Farber who is on
this list put it a little differently.
Aug 22, 1999: Farber: "I wish the Board had moved more rapidly to do
the job they assumed when they agreed to take office. What ever the
reasons for the delay, it would be unconscionable for the Board to
stop doing its task."
I had some spirited interchange with Dave then trying to ascertain
what he judged to be the "job they assumed" and the "task" the board
was doing. I don't think other than an expression of irritation I
ever received an answer. Of course nothing reqires Dave to answer
should he choose not to. I realize that. But I would suggest his
deisres above are cryptically phrased and wonder what the advantage
is to him or his list readers or to the internet of speaking in such
cryptic terms.
Since then we have had some further debate on why ICANN failure and
government involvement would endager the internet. One would think
that when Cerf and Patrick asked VCs for money for ICANN holding out
the failure of the internet and e-commerce as a danger they would be
prepared to back up their worry with a real scenario that would let
others judge. Have asked the same question of Dave Farber. About
two weeks ago (maybe 3?) he promised to work on one saying not to
expect it in a matter of days. Since I have not seen him publish one
I assume that he is still dilligently working on his scenario.
Given the importance of this one would think, if Patrick, Cerf, and
Farber were not spreading FUD, we'd have had their explanation by
now...... unless the explanation were so horrible that they feared
setting off shock waves by saying in public what they had in mind.
My hypothesis about calling attention to the lack of legal authority
for the Department of Commerce to do what it is doing is the only
scenario I can come up with for explaining their ominous but
otherwise vague warnings.
>Gordon Cook <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > But now the other part of this picture also begins to come into
> > focus. This is the curious insistence of folk like Vint Cerf, John
> > Patick and Dave Farber to say that if ICANN does not succeed, the
> > Internet and electonic commerce will fail. When asked for a thorough
> > and reasoned explanation of why none of these men have an answer. I
> > suspect that I know why. The answer is that the authority for DNS,
> > IP number allocation and port assignment rested not in law but in the
> > consensual agreement of the Internet community with Jon Postel. Now
> > Postel is gone. The department of commerce without a shred of legal
> > authority to do so has stepped up to and asserted like General Haig
> > that it is in control now. It will hold the reigns of power until it
> > can turn them over to ICANN. This is why ICANN must not fail because
> > it would them be revealed to the world and especialy to investors in
> > the high flying Internet stocks that no signle legal authority
> > existed over the operaton of the Internet's address system.
>
>Well, I don't expect statements like this to make the front pages of
>the Wall Street Journal. :) However, in the event that the CEOs of Internet
>500 companies did become aware of this, I imagine they would lobby for some
>sort of Federal intervention to work out a domain name, IP address, and
>protocol policy that did permit them to communicate, while maintaining the
>existing agreements under which the NII was created. History tells us that
>when this sort of thing happened in the past (frequency allocation), big
>business came out on top.
>
>--gregbo
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