At 4:33 PM 9/22/95, Michael StJohns wrote:

Please! Take all of the above with a grain of salt - my general feeling is that the feds feel they are holding the numbers and namespace in trust for the community and really do have the internets best interests (e.g.

Mike, the secrecy and lack of public review and consensus-building that has accompanied recent DNS-related decisions by NSI do not look like the handling of a public trust. For that matter the nature of the conflict-resolution rules and the nature of the charges imposed on new domain names are fundamentally off the mark. Purity in the minds of those making the decisions and, for that matter, seriousness of immediate financial and legal problems, do not make the current style or details of these decisions acceptable. As I said earlier, in one of the various threads on this topic, NSF (and of course ARPA) deserve much and great credit for the creation and nurturing. But I agree with the view that this is a public resource -- a global resource -- and we need to treat it accordingly. Control over these resources needs to rest with a global Internet resource. The IANA is already integrated into the Internet structure. What's missing, of course, is non-governmental funding. In general it does not look as if the community is resisting imposition of fees, though it sure would have been better for the details of the funding debate to take place before imposition by fiat. In any event, we need funding to be done via a public agency, but not a government agency. Using U.S. constructs, a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation acting as a public trust for IANA/Internic/IETF/... funding would seem to make the most sense. In particular, the funding activity needs to be handled by an agency which is independent of any particular administrator of Internet functions. d/ -------------------- Dave Crocker +1 408 246 8253 Brandenburg Consulting fax: +1 408 249 6205 675 Spruce Dr. page: +1 408 581 1174 Sunnyvale, CA 94086 USA dcrocker@brandenburg.com