[NA-Discuss] Foreign Policy and the Internet
John R. Levine
johnl at iecc.com
Tue Aug 14 19:39:15 UTC 2012
> Had Verisign chosen to tender a competitive bid, factors other than
> the extremely specialized knowledge of the incumbent contractor would
> have been determinative.
>
> Similarly, had the North American Numbering Plan Administrator (and
> also the .US operator) chosen to tender a competitive bid, again,
> factors other than the extremely specialized knowledge of the
> incumbent contractor would have been determinative.
Acually, based on correspondence with IANA people, it is my impression
that putting updates into the root zone and sending it along to Verisign
is the easy part. Small countries sometimes send in requests to make
foolish or impossible changes, and tactful negotiations are required to
get to something reasonable since they can't tell countries that they're
being stupid. Also, there is a constant stream of updates from the IETF
to the ports and parameter registries, and I can say from personal
experience that IANA has a lot of specialized expertise there, too. The
obvious thing for a competing bidder to do would be to hire current or
former IANA staff, but there's definitely an expertise issue beyond what
Verisign and Neustar already do.
That said, I agree with your theory about what DoC was doing. They've
made it quite clear for a very long time that they're not going to use
access to the root to pressure other countries.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
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