December 6th, 2004

IETF-style ICANN

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An anonymous writer posted an article title Time for Reformation of the Internet on Susan Crowford’s blog. The article calls for an liberal approach towards ICANN making lots of references to IETF and its process.

Two years ago, I might applause the article but since working for IDA, I learnt a lot of the policy making process to think otherwise. While I also called for ICANN to be more liberal and hence still agreed with some of issues discussed, I dont agree with the conclusion, particularly the references to Jon Postel. (See also Elliot Noss’s comment).

First observation: It is written by an engineer. As I commented to Joi & Roberto in Cape Town, it is a mistake to think engineers = good policy maker. At best, we are good advocates and advisors. I am not saying it is not important to understand the technology (and it is the duty of technologists to educate policy makers), I am saying policy formulations are far more complex, involving people, money and ecosystem.1
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December 5th, 2004

VISA meets Dog

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internet-dog-small.jpgJeff ordered a VISA debit card for his beloved Dog. Give a real meaning to On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog! Haha :-)

December 4th, 2004

ICANN At-Large

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I seldom talk about anything else other then IDN at ICANN meeting. But after several discussion over the week with various people, and prompting by Alan Levin, I decided to do so despite knowingly I am going to offend quite a few friends.

The topic I talked at the open mike during the public forum is on the progress with At-Large (ALAC). I was a long time critic of general public participations after witnessing how General Assembly attracted “colourful characters” like Jeff William. This remain so until Stuart Lynn, former president of ICANN who initiated the ICANN reformed, convienced me with one statement two years back: “Without ALAC, how are you going to contribute to ICANN as an individual?”

Fast forward two years to today, I believe something is fundamentally wrong with ALAC now. Not that I don’t believe at ALAC anymore but I am concerned with the approach ALAC has taken to gain community participation.
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December 3rd, 2004

Be more liberal please…

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At the public forum, Elliot Noss (CEO of Tucows) brought up a controvisal topic of new gTLDs – Vint’s commented that DNS is designed to be hierarchical in nature and hence not able to support large number of TLDs.

To be exact, Vint is technically correct. And it is also true that we might have problems if we have large numbers of TLDs, creating a flat naming hierarchy and hence creating dependency on the (only) 13 root servers. However, such arguments are no long valid – we actually have more then 13 physical root servers, all scattered around the world via share-any-cast. Over 40 root-servers to be more exact and potentially as many as we want. So load-wise, we certainly don’t have problems supporting more TLDs then say 2 years ago.

What we don’t know is how many TLDs can we support now…nor do we know a way to accurately predict that. But my guess is 100,000 TLDs without a sweat.

The trend is that we already going flat. Restricting flatness in the TLDs means we get flatness in 2LD. (See related news on Verisign getting 5.1m new registration in last quarter.) We have over 66M zones under .com and .net and here we are arguing over a few TLDs?

While I don’t subscribe to Elliot free-for-all regime on TLDs, I think we can be more liberal with new TLDs.

December 3rd, 2004

Fun @ ICANN

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cape-castle.jpgOne of the “nice thing” been an ICANN regular is you get to travel to all sort of exotic places for ICANN meetings. You also get invitations to castles and palaces hosted by Ministers and Mayors. For example, like having dinner at the Cape Castle, the oldest castle in African continent.
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December 3rd, 2004

Words of the year

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..is tada, “blog” (via FastCompany :-)

Merriam-Webster, the dictionary folks, have put out its annual list of the 10 most popular words of the year. The list is put together from the number of online lookups at its site.

And the winner is… “blog.” Yay, blog! I assume that no one reading this needed to go to Merriam-Webster to look this up, but I suppose it does reflect the further mainstreaming of the concept.

December 2nd, 2004

Proposal to implement IDN TLD

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During the breakfast pre-panel discussion, a few of us were sitting around and discussing IDN Top Level Domains (TLDs). Normally, such debates goes no where but surprisingly, we actually got some agreement this time!

The first thing we note is that there is no perfect solution. Every proposals has some problems – it does not work with ccTLD; it breaks gTLD; it does not handle minority languages/scripts; it has collision with other languages; etc. So we should just try to find a solution which has the least amount of pain, so long it works, can scale and can be implemented reasonably.

Another thing to note is that gTLD, sTLD and ccTLD are very different from one another. It is unlikely we can find a solution that works for all type TLD. We should tackle them individually and differently.
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December 2nd, 2004

Politeness on Panel

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Why is it that we have very interesting discussion openly during dinner or breakfast, but put everyone on a panel on stage, everyone become so quiet and so polite?

idn-panel-cape-town.jpg

This happened at my IDN Workshop yesterday. I wasn’t able to join the pre-panel dinner but I was told everyone have a lot of interesting debates. The morning preparation meeting I have with them are also very heated. I thought we going to have a lot of fun later on stage.

But no, I was so wrong.

I dont mean the panel is lousy (it isn’t – the panelists done a great job I think) but it could have been so much more vibrant and exciting, only if they aren’t all so polite and more willing to speak their mind.

Is it because after two session of debate, everyone is tired? If so, maybe we should not have all these pre-panel meetings. Or perhaps I should just armed myself with a video recorder at the pre-panel dinner and replay them at the session itself.

ps: Of course, I am just kidding on the last suggestion. :-)

December 2nd, 2004

New Tactic by Comment Spammers

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I received quite a lot of comment spams in the last few days. Apparently, the comment spammers seem to be engaging in a new tactic: Redirect people to random entries on my blog who then post comment spams manually.

What I couldn’t figure out is how and why these people would do that…

December 1st, 2004

Arrived in Cape Town

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Arrived in Cape Town last night. I think they overbooked the hotel so they give me a president suite1 which is pretty nice but pointless for me. Never figure out why anyone need such a big room.

Anyway, I am here for the ICANN meeting. Particularly, I am helping to moderate a panel for the IDN Workshop. I missed the IDN panel dinner last night so I catch up with my panelists only this morning. Other then the usual suspects from the ccTLD, we also have Microsoft (Michel) and Mozilla (Darin, presented by William) this time round. It is going to be fun ;-)

We also have pretty heated discussion on IDN.IDN2 which is pretty interesting. Most importantly, we actually have some rough consensus so I’m going to talk about that in the following policy panel later.

1 Yes, I am switching room later today.

2 See my previous article on IDN.IDN.