From: "Ken Ryan" <wkryan@gmail.com>
To: <DNSTransition@ntia.doc.gov>
Date: Thu, Jul 6, 2006 10:55 AM
Subject: Comment - DNS transition to the private sector While acknowledging a significant debt to the international
community
for participating in the Internet, we should remember that
Internet
creation and development were U.S. taxpayer funded.
If the NTIA believes that American economic traditions
such as market
orientation, private sector involvement (including risk),
entrepreneurial effort and competition (including technical
innovation) are positive forces for development, then
Internet
management should exemplify and rely upon them. These
principles are
not always supported at present.
One example:
The 1998 DNS White Paper introduced the idea of creating
new generic
TLDs to increase competition and ostensibly increase
scarce Internet
name space. In amendment 6 of the MOU in 2003, ICANN
agrees to
"Continue the process of implementing new top level
domains" while the
expansion TLDs approved in the past 6 years have not
been successful
in the market.
The Government mandate to introduce new TLDs is uncomfortably
reminiscent of old Eastern Bloc central committee fiats
in ignoring
market response. By creating the mind set that only one
method of
increasing competition and scarce Internet name space
is acceptable,
the NTIA and ICANN have discouraged investigation and
innovation of
other approaches.
And another:
ICANN relies on the Internet Engineering Task Force
to develop
infrastructure standards. The IETF has traditionally
called patented
technology "encumbered". Does the U.S. Department
of Commerce, which
runs the U.S. Patent and Trademark system, consider patents
encumberments, or do patents exist to spur the creation
of ever
improving technology? Does the process of creating an
IETF standard
(http://www.ietf.org/tao.html paragraph 8.2) sound compatible
with
patenting?
May I suggest that NTIA look more closely at the generally
accepted
principles of a successful market economy, and formulate
policies in
agreement with them. Why othrewise consider a transition
of the
technical coordination and management of the Internet
domain name and
addressing system to the private sector?
W K Ryan
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