[governance] "Oversight"

[David Conrad]

Norbert and Parminder,

On Jun 14, 2012, at 3:53 AM, parminder wrote:
> Norbert has put the 'slippery slope' scenario quite well.

 From my perspective, having been at times in various points in the processes you're concerned about, these scenarios all fail the sniff test.  They rely on several independent parties (at the very least, the USG, the root server operators, and the operators of resolvers) all working in concert against their own self interest in order for actions to be taken that can be much more easily imposed with less political/economic/social risk/fallout at other points in the system.  The idea that ISPs of the world would turn a blind eye and meekly submit if the US government decided to hijack root name resolution regardless of the reason doesn't even pass the giggle test for me.

However, it seems clear to me that you are convinced this is a viable threat and nothing I can say will convince you otherwise.  I gather you believe there needs to be a treaty-based solution to address that threat:

> But since in the discharge of the oversight role, commission is a much bigger issue than omission, it is certainly better if say 15 other country reps have to simultaneously agree to an act of commission along with the US rather than US getting to decide it alone.

(and people complain that root zone changes take far too long now :-))
 
> And that much better if there is an international law to clearly describe the oversight role, its procedures and limits, and an international judicial system to adjudicate whether the concerned body acted as per the relevant international law.

As I tried to describe earlier, as far as I know, the current role of the USG in matters related to root zone management is to verify that ICANN hasn't gone off the rails. It has no active role. It doesn't propose changes (well, other than changes to domains it has direct responsibility for like .US).  What exactly do you anticipate this international body doing? Given the technical architecture of the DNS requires a single source of data and that single source must physically exist in some host country somewhere, how would this international body prevent the host country from doing exactly the same actions you believe the US can take?

> None of this exists at present vis a vis US's exercise of the oversight role. It just a bunch of people convinced that US's is a good and benign government. 

You keep saying this, but I see no evidence of this stance from anyone.  What I do see is pragmatism: the Internet largely works (for some value of the variable 'work') and before we risk that, we need to be sure what replaces the current scheme isn't going to break things.

Regards,
-drc

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