Subject: Re: [Internetgovtech] Discussion of principles for governance

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2014 20:26:27 -0500

In the following paragraph John is making reference which I suspect is
limited to "an odd group of ICANN lifers" of size one -- myself.

>                                           ... (The other 2% is from
> an odd group of ICANN lifers who believe that it is still 1998, are
> unaware that people use Google, not the DNS, to find stuff on the
> Internet, and so have impassioned yet mind numbing arguments about
> issues like whether the WHO's application for .HEALTH ten years ago
> should have been grandfathered in the current TLD round.)

In any event, Brian made the following suggestion:

> (As a special case, I think we can take the position that open,
> self-organizing multi-stakeholder consensus formation in the
> IETF and the RIRs has demonstrably led to highly successful open
> interoperable technical standards and operational practices.)

After writing the specification that eventually became the Single Unix
Specification I accepted a position at SRI, one funded by the US DoD
and constributed to work eventually published as RFCs, e.g., 1122/1123
which Bob Braden edited. The community of contributors to IETF meetings
in that period appear, in retrospect, at least to me, to have been as
successful at creating open, interoperable technical standards and
operational practices, as the current period, which has contributors
who are not generally funded by governments.

I suggest that whatever "multi-stakeholder" means that the success to
which Brian refers pre-existed a delegation of authority from an agency
of government, and has survived the privitization of datagram transport.

Eric