[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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