[governance] RE: organizational orientation

[Thomas Narten]

Thanks George, for saying many of the same things I would say.

BTW, I can support your claim as to not being an IETF insider. In
fact, I do not believe I had any idea who you were until I started
participating in ICANN stuff (coming up on 3 years).

George Sadowsky <george.sadowsky at attglobal.net> writes:

> Here's my bottom line.  By and large, Internet organizations with 
> which I'm familiar are open and welcome involvement by others.  But; 
> like any other social group, it helps to know something about the 
> subject first (or just admit that you're a newbie and there to listen 
> and learn), and to enter the group with a cooperative and 
> collaborative attitude  --  an to expect that there maybe some jerks 
> in the group, but they're probably a small minority.

Bingo!

It is not the case that policy is policy and technology is
technology. They intersect all the time. You can't make good policy
(or even have an informed policy discussion) without having at least
some basic understanding in the underlying technology (or at least
listening to others who do understand and tell you that such and such
is technically problematic). Otherwise you start making policy that
requires 1+1 to equal 3.

The RIRs do not do addressing policy in a technology vaccuum. Indeed,
it is critical that address policy discussions are grounded in the
reality that address policy impacts routing, and without routing, the
Internet won't work. Many, many people I've run into on the policy
simply don't (or won't) grasp this and like to pontificate that
Moore's law will fix these sorts of things, or engineers just haven't
tried hard enough to solve the problem, etc. It should be no surprise
that engineers tire of such discussions.

The best engineering definitely takes policy implications into
consideration. Indeed, the best technology supports a broad range of
policies. But at the end of the day, there are many policies we can
imagine that simply can't be implemented with existing technology. Or
at least, not without serious amounts of money at the problem (which
most people don't have), or redesigning the world in which we live in,
etc.

Thomas
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