Letter from Accredited EDUCAUSE and Internet2 to U.S. Department of Commerce
(22 August 2002)

August 22, 2002

Nancy J. Victory, Administrator
National Telecommunications and Information Administration
U.S. Department of Commerce
1401 Constitution Ave NW
Washington, DC 20230

Dear Asst. Secretary Victory,

As you know, EDUCAUSE and Internet2 together represent the executive leadership of networking and information technology in U.S. higher education. Since our community has a very important stake in the stable operation and future development of the Internet as a whole and the domain-name system in particular, we would like to make our position clear on the ongoing discussions of ICANN and its relationship to the U.S. Government.

• Higher Education continues to strongly support the private sector approach to Internet/DNS technical coordination and believes ICANN, through community based policy development, is the best means to accomplish the necessary work to maintain stability and promote continued innovation.
• Higher Education supports the current ICANN process of self-assessment and improvement in internal processes and procedures and encourages NTIA to extend the Memorandum of Understanding in a manner consistent with the recently adopted ICANN Blueprint for Evolution and Reform.
• Higher Education believes that, for security and other reasons, faster progress should be made toward implementation of the planned root server architecture improvements and that NTIA should assign greater priority to this work in its revisions to the Memorandum of Understanding.
• Higher Education believes that ICANN has an important and irreplaceable role in ensuring fair and open competition in the worldwide registration and administration of domain names and believes that NTIA should continue to strongly support ICANN's registry/registrar contract-monitoring and -enforcement activities.

Best regards,

Page Updated 30-Aug-2002
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