Oki all, I suppose I should update what I have up at {nic,noc}-iq.nic-naa.net. At the Rome meeting I spoke (open mic) to the ICANN BOD about the issue. That was a year ago. A week before the Asian Tsunami David Cuthbertson wrote to me and asked about the delegation. He works for Adam Smith International out of the British Embassy, Baghdad and his client was the "Iraqi government" created by US/UK military. The quotation marks and the "created by ..." is my commentary, not his. I gave him my understanding of the situation and my advice freely, knowing that he and/or his client wouldn't take the core nugget -- talk to the current delegee and find a way to arrange either restarted operations (as simple as a NS change request) or a consensual change of delegation. Shortly after the Asian Tsunami I faxed Vint Cerf a letter on the status of .iq and reviewed the arguements that could be brought by a party seeking a non-consensual change of delegation. Naturally, IANAL, but then again, what lawyer knows anything about this rather arcane area of policy? Vint was in India at the time and I was more interested in aid getting to the tribal people in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands than .iq, which has been on hold for two years already, and the Indian military were keeping any of the medical aid, or aid workers, from MSF or Oxfam, from getting to the tribal areas. There was an exchange of notes on .iq, mostly of my views on the danger to the system of internet governance and my views on the export rule infraction, and a suggestion. I haven't heard anything since. I suppose everyone on the *NOG lists understands that .iq could be a very bushy tree, with leaf nodes that resolve to live machines containing data germane to the leaf-node-name, not necessarily "in" Iraq, and with one or more levels of subdelegation, for schools, hospitals, and so on, reflecting the academic and civil society, as well as several transitional governments, refugees, NGOs, International Treaty Organizations, and interested foreign governments and businesses. The "no power, no wires, therefor no dns" kind of nonsense doesn't need refuting here. Eric