[At-Large] france at large questions to the French Government

[JFC Morfin]

For those having some French: france at large [ * ] has now completed on 
http://franceatlarge.org/wiki/QFR its questions to the French 
Government over the RFC (request for candidates) they published to 
replace AFNIC as the organism managing ".fr".

This document is probably one of the most complete concerning the 
domain name space evolution and importance for a country in our 
present time and in the years to come (aside the commercial issues 
for plain dumb domain names addressed by ICANN which represent a tiny 
portion of the matter at hand).

The basic interest is that France has a law which consider the 
reality of the service provided to citizens (on-line public 
communication) without any reference to the present 
Internet/IETF/ICANN/ISOC solution. It only uses the common term 
"internet" (lower cases) whithout defining it : it therefore has to 
be taken from dictionnaries (mostly as the packet switch network of 
the digital ecosystem). That law also understands naming as a public 
service to citizens that is delegated under the responsibility of the 
Government. One of the question france at large raises is to know if 
that naming is for only to be used on the internet, and in such a 
case why special relations with ICANN ?

An added interest is that this call for candidates concerns one of 
the main ccTLD and therefore represents some kind of "DNS development 
review" no other country has engaged before. Also, that the 
Questionnaire is part of the candidacy process, and the Government 
(active GAC member and one of the European partners) must respond and 
publish its answers to the 122 france at large questions. Last but not 
least, the question is posed of the legal relations with the the 
digital convergence and with the (Multilingual and Semantic Internet, 
the internet of the thoughts).

  jfc

[ * ] The ALS that does not exist, so Staff could never answer them 
officially.....