[MemberPubPol] Re: [chapter-delegates] FYI - in the coming discussion of the WGIG questionnaire

[Franck Martin]

Fred Baker wrote:

> So I guess I hear two points of discussion:
>  - some would like ICANN to become a treaty organization, and may have 
> good reasons for their viewpoint.
>  - I still think I hear anti-US sentiment.

It is fashionable nowadays ;)

>
> If the right thing to do is to make ICANN a treaty organization or 
> move its functions to one, then I'm willing to support that. I have to 
> say that the argument for doing so needs to be laid out pretty 
> clearly, as the current treaty organizations haven't been inspiring. 
> But I'm willing for someone to make the case. The argument "we're from 
> government, so we're obviously the right people for the job" doesn't 
> work. I need an argument that points out issues with the current 
> structure - ICANN, RIRs, registrars and registries, etc etc etc and 
> demonstrates that none of those problems would have happened if ICANN 
> had been a treaty organization and no new problems would have 
> materialized, or that there was a way to definitively handle new 
> problems that might arise. If you sense skepticism in my voice, you 
> sense well. My question about Taiwan's country code is a very real 
> one, and very painful for the people of Taiwan. There is not currently 
> a ccTLD for the Palestinian Authority, because .pl hasn't made it onto 
> the right ISO list, but Palestinians can indeed get domain names - 
> they just happen to be Israeli. For the people of Taiwan to use VoIP 
> across borders, they have to work around the ITU's enum registry, and 
> are currently moving in that direction. ITU, by its mismanagement of 
> the registry, may completely lose control of it over time.

I don't think having ICANN as a treaty organisation will change much, it 
is more for the piece of mind. Also one has to be carefull that being a 
treaty organisation, with some diplomatic status, it does not become 
above all laws. But going as a treaty is mainly for that.

>
> <tangent>
> One of the things I find most clueless in that discussion, BTW, is a 
> particular slide I have seen in s zillion presentations. In 1999, I 
> (among others including Paul Wilson) met with the Ministry of 
> Information Industry in China, and told the Vice Minister that his 
> country needed to move to IPv6 for reasons related to addressing. That 
> was during the ChinaInet Conference in Beijing in June of that year. 
> In the same conference the following year, I showed a slide that 
> started from Geoff Huston's numbers regarding IP routes and 
> demonstrated that the IPv4 address space was become very fragmented. I 
> also spoke about IPv4 address allocations (IPv4 addresses are today 
> about 65% allocated, and depending on how you read the tea leaves 
> could be 100% allocated somewhere between 2008 and 2014), and the 
> number of addresses then allocated to China. I pointed out that for 
> historical reasons there was a certain university in the US that had 
> as many addresses as China, and that China's need for IPv4 addresses 
> presuming the same network penetration as in the US could not be met 
> in the IPv4 address space. I argued that China would do well to 
> seriously consider moving to IPv6 at the earliest possible juncture 
> (something China is actively doing). Those particular slides have made 
> it into talks from any number of corporations, and into ITU talks, and 
> in the latter are used to argue that the imbalance would never have 
> happened if the ITU had been managing the address space. Well, 
> bologna. First, it is making an irrelevant point from data that is not 
> relevant to that discussion. Second, it is without attribution (my 
> slide said it was copyright Cisco Systems). Third, if ITU had been 
> managing the address space, it would have had the same history and the 
> same set of considerations that went into managing the address space, 
> and would very likely have made similar allocations.
> </tangent>

Fred, I don't agree with you. If ITU would have been in charge, then we 
will be still discussing how many IP should go to which countries. And 
until a quorun is met, there would have been no implementation.

On a similar note, if the ITU was in charge of the phone space, why do I 
have to dial 1 for the USA. Are the USA so special that they have to be 
first. Was the ITU managing that?

>
> Regarding the anti-US sentiment, I have to say that I think the tone 
> of this entire discussion would be dramatically different if ICANN 
> were a non-treaty organization incorporated in some other country, 
> such as Ireland, Japan, or whatever. I get pretty used to encountering 
> yankee-go-home sentiment wherever I go, but that doesn't stop it from 
> grating on me.
>
Fred, you know there is something wrong when the french think the 
american are arrogant ;)


(NOTE: I like sarcastic humour)

-- 
Franck Martin
ICT Specialist
franck at sopac.org
SOPAC, Fiji
GPG Key fingerprint = 44A4 8AE4 392A 3B92 FDF9  D9C6 BE79 9E60 81D9 1320
"Toute connaissance est une reponse a une question" G.Bachelard

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