IP: A note from Vint Cerf Re: IAB Last Call on new IANA Statement

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 05:18:35 -0400
From: "vinton g. cerf" <vcerf@MCI.NET>
Subject: Re: IAB Last Call on new IANA Statement
X-Sender: vcerf@alpha1.reston.mci.net
To: Robert Moskowitz <rgm-ietf@htt-consult.com>,
        Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>, IETF <ietf@ietf.org>
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Folks,


forgive me for adding to your email burden but I wanted to react to the
important issue raised below. 


First, it is pretty critical that there be some process by which serious
malfunctions in any of the organizations critical to Internet operation
can be remedied. If IANA, or RIPE NCC or APNIC or ARIN suddenly
goes crazy, there has to be some way for the Internet Community
(users, vendors, service providers and engineers) to respond.
That observation probably goes double for domain names.


Whether that is through a form of oversight or something else is,
of course, what a great deal of the debate on newIANA has been
about. 


Also, along these lines, I think it is pretty important to read any
proposal for a re-engineered IANA in the context of what happens
if the operators of the organization malfunction. What mechanisms
are proposed to deal with that and are you persuaded that they can
be made to work? That's important because we can't assume we
will always have someone as rational as Jon Postel steering the
process. The same concerns should apply to other critical elements
of the Internet administrative universe. 


Protecting Internet from abusive practices is an important part of
developing new or re-engineered organizations. I think the proposals
Jon has put on the table are workable, but you need to look
at them with the same care that went into the POISED effort, for
instance. As painful at that may have been, I think it resulted in
a set of procedures that were not dependent on any one individual
being infallible.


Vint Cerf




At 05:09 PM 8/27/98 -0500, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
>At 01:53 PM 8/27/98 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote:
>>
>>The nIANA is not a world government.  The universe of nIANA, as
>>defined in the IANA draft, is restricted to oversight of three
>>organizations, which are in turn concerned with Internet names,
>>numbers, and protocols, and the policies associated with them.  Since 
>>the universe of nIANA is centered on these three entities, these 
>>three entities have distinguished representation.
>
>careful there.  nIANA does not have oversight of the three organizations.
>Jon made that clear.  Rather these organizations give nIANA work, in a
>sense.  This is particularly true of the Protocols org, that create
>protocols that have names and numbers that nIANA manages.  the protocol
>org(s) also advise the nIANA on protocol issues related to its naming and
>addressing roles.
> 
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