[governance] phones vs. the Internet, was NTIA announcement on JPA

[John Levine]

>> Except that none of them have a chokepoint analgous to the DNS root,
>
>Factually wrong. International telephone country codes need to be
>globally coordinated, just as the DNS root zone does.

Hi, Milt.  Actually, it's factually right.  The phone system is not
one system, it's a bunch of national or regional systems connected
together with gateways, more analogous to the way e-mail worked in the
1990s than the way the Internet works.  The numbering plan is
currently mostly consistent around the world, but unlike the Internet,
different countries have different incompatible hardware and software,
and there have been plenty of inconsistent dialing plans, shortcut
numbers, countries with wierdo rules for international dialing, you
name it.  We don't even have consistent dialing in New York and
Vermont.  The signalling in North America is completely incompatible
with the signalling in Europe or South America, with gateways at the
border to glue them together.  A coordinated numbering space is merely
a convenience to the telephone system, not essential like consistent
IP and DNS addressing are for the Internet.

>> Look, I am no fan of ICANN, as should be clear to anyone who followed
>> my stint on the ICANN ALAC.  But if you want to replace them, the
>> issue isn't that they're not "legitimate", it's that they're
>> incompetent.  Registrars collapse, and ICANN first denies for a year
>
>Incompetent at what?

At its nominal public benefit mission, of course.  As I said, ICANN is
perceived as legitimate now (wow, we agree on something) and arguments
that it has to do something to become legitimate are silly.  But it's
incompetent at managing registrars, adding new TLDs, blah blah, which
is why I said:

>> If you want to replace ICANN, forget about legitimacy, and think hard
>> about competence.  Offer an actual better alternative, and then you
>> have a chance of getting someone's attention.


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