[governance] Re: Alternative DNS systems and net neutrality

[Dan Krimm]

Well then, Veni, it seems you have not expressed yourself very clearly.

If I can assume that you in fact agree that political issues are impossible
to avoid in Internet governance (i.e., you are not running away from them,
as you have said), that is good.  You seemed to be defending those who
argue that what ICANN is doing (i.e., particularly in the realm of DNS
policy) is purely technical, and I was pointing out that it was profoundly
political in nature.

Given that DNS issues are political, the proper standard of evaluation as
to whether DNS is "working" or not is, thus, a political evaluation, not
merely a technical evaluation.  Thus when you claim that DNS "is working"
and you point to technical criteria for that evaluation, you are simply
missing the political point (and missing or ignoring the sense of the
English word "working" to encompass political criteria in this context).
Whether you are doing this by mistake or intentionally I can't be certain,
but either way it is misguided.  Political criteria are required in order
to evaluate whether DNS "is working" from a political viewpoint, and the
political viewpoint is the important one here.

This was my point from the beginning, and nothing you have said contradicts
this substantively.  If your "question" (about numbers and/or importance of
those for whom DNS does not "work") was merely a question and not a
rhetorical statement, then my previous answer to that stands (with
attention to my use of the word "working" as referring to the
political-power sense, with my definition of power in this context as "the
monopoly power of ICANN to decide who/what gets into the root and who/what
does not"):

"Apparently for many who wish to operate TLDs that have not currently been
allowed into root, it is not working.  And perhaps in a larger sense (in
terms of public policy for the general public that might wish to use those
rejected TLDs by registering 2LDs in them) it is not really working either,
though they may not be aware of it if they are not ICANN insiders."

I'm sorry you did not understand this.  When you originally proclaimed:

">1. The current model is working."

I saw this as being clearly wrong, when one considers whether the current
DNS model "is working" in a *political* sense, which is the sense that
matters most here.  (Your argument seems to be that DNS works in a
technical sense, but who cares about that?  That is not in dispute and that
is not the important point -- it is a trivial point in the context of the
political dispute.  When you try to make this discussion about the merely
technical operational characteristics of DNS, you seem to take sides with
those who claim that ICANN is only dealing with technical matters.  Perhaps
this is why I was misled into thinking that you were trying to avoid the
political issues.  I'm so glad to hear that you are not running away from
the politics here, as the politics are critically important.)

At best, the current model is *working badly* from a political standpoint,
and that is precisely the problem, and exactly why we should "touch it" and
try to "fix it" instead of allowing the status quo to endure.

I hope we've cleared this up, now.

Dan

PS -- As for the technical issues involved with alternative root systems, I
will leave that to folks like Karl, etc.  I would agree that it would be
best for any alternative root setup to keep the technical operation of DNS
as reliable as possible (and that means minimizing the potential for TLD
collisions, for example).  But ultimately, technical and political
considerations need to be balanced.  It may be that a constrained degree of
technical problems are worth dealing with if the political equation can be
resolved better.  And it may be that there need be no trade-off in the
first place, and that we can have both reliable technical operation and
fair political power balance in DNS.

These are political questions, and their answers are political answers.

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