[NA-Discuss] Foreign Policy and the Internet -- coda

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

Glenn,

Thanks for the thought provoking post.  I've greatly enjoyed writing
bits of a response over the past several days.  The first note was
written while minding children splashing about the beach on the north
shore of Lake Huron.  The second note was written in part in Wawa, and
in part while again minding children splashing about the beach on the
north shore of Lake Superior, as was the whole of the third note.

It has been a very pleasant writing experience, off-line, with
intermittent access when traveling by road.

v4 exhaustion and the slow uptake of v6 point to futures of broken
nets -- either due to carrier grade NATs, putting "smarts" back into
the dumb network -- leading the connectionless network away from the
end to end argument towards the connectionist (ITU) network model, or
due to gateways essentially implementing the same scoping of address
meaning -- leading the connectionless network away from the single
address space (and hence single root) model towards an interconnect of
national or regional networks model (see ITU, supra).

The ITU's proposal to replace the working regional address registries
may fail, I contributed a policy note to the U.S. Delegation to the
ITU Meeting on IPv6 (Geneva), in March of 2010, making the case that
transnational populations could be adversely affected by making v6
allocations only through national registries -- an example being the
Rom population in Europe, and one or more European governments
pursuing policies adverse to Roms and in violation of the Treaty of
Europe and International Law.

However, it is hard to keep a straight face and make the claim that
the ITU must necessarily do worse at new gTLD policy making than ICANN
has in the past year.  If the ITU did exactly what ICANN did, adding
only an equity of member state limit on identical business models,
then ICANN's own diversity and inclusive goals would be better met
than is currently the case -- where most of the approximately 2,000
identical business case applications are made by North American
applicants using domestic or off-shore tax haven domiciles.

The next three years, when the IANA Functions contract is up for
competitive bid again, when more than one bidder can be expected, will
be very, very challenging for ICANN as an institution, and for the
continued existence of its "public interest" mission contained in both
the Green and White Papers.

Eric Brunner-Williams
Candidate, NARALO ALAC Rep. election 2012