As you can see from the letter below, WITSA and ITAA are lobbying
their members to support the BMW proposal. In the process, they are
telling untruths about the alternative, Paris draft proposal. Ms.
O'Neill below implies that the Paris draft proposal was signed *only*
by NSI and ORSC. She does not mention the AIP, the DNRC, nor the 20+
ccTLD registries who have also supported the Paris draft. Furthermore,
using the time honored but now rather wearying ISOC-POC-PAB-CORE
tactics, they attempt to base their appeal for support almost entirely
on animosity to NSI, thus proving that they have no interest in moving
beyond the factional divisions that have stymied progress in Internet
administration for the past four years.
Unfortunately, many WITA/ITAA members will not know enough about this
issue to perceive the false claims. Ms. O'Neill distributed a canned
boilerplate "letter of support" to their members, and presumably some
of them will forward it, filling in the blanks. This is perhaps a
foretaste of what the people who run the dnso.org consider to be
"representation" and "bottom up governance."
The ICANN/White Paper process was supposed to represent "industry
self-governance" based on private-sector "consensus-building" outside
of government. It should be clear by now that the factions and
factional alignments have not changed, and that the process is nothing
more than a vehicle for one faction to win at the expense of others.
--MM
February 21, 1999
TO: Members of the World Information Technology
and
Services Alliance (WITSA)
FR: Sheila O'Neill, WITSA Executive Director
Jon Englund, ITAA Senior VP
RE: Internet Management Structure
As a result of a note we sent around 3 or 4 weeks ago
requesting input, WITSA (along with 9 additional organizations) has
signed onto one of the proposals developed on how to structure the
Domain Names Supporting Organization (DNSO), which is part of the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
We now would like to ask for the support of all
individual WITSA members by asking each organization if you would be
willing to endorse the proposal. Below is a boilerplate endorsement
letter that you may use for this purpose. We would also welcome the
support of any of your individual member companies, so feel free to
also
distribute this material to your members. Anders Halvorsen will be
following up in the next couple of days with a telephone call or
e-mail
to find out whether you are willing to have your individual
organization
endorse the proposal. Your support is important for the future of the
Internet globally. The decision-making process is moving quickly, and
if you would like to support the DNSO application you must let Anders
Halvorsen know no later than Monday, March 1st. If we do not hear
from you we will assume you cannot support the proposal or have not
had
adequate time to confer with your members.
The organizations signing onto our
Barcelona/Monterrey/Washington proposal include:
* Electronic Commerce Europe (ECE);
* European ISP Association (EuroISPA);
* Information Technology Association of America (ITAA);
* International Chamber of Commerce (ICC);
* International Council of Registrars (CORE);
* International Trademark Association (INTA);
* Internet Society (ISOC);
* Policy Oversight Committee (POC);
* World Information Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA);
* American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA).
*
The proposal, submitted to ICANN by their deadline of
February 5th, can be found at: http://www.icann.org/SOapps.html Only
one other proposal was submitted. This competing proposal was signed
by:
* Network Solutions, Inc. based in Herndon, Virgina, USA (which
currently has a monopoly over the allocation of the .com, .org, and
.net
domains); and
* The Open Root Server Confederation (a small group of 7 or 8
individuals). ICANN has been transferred authority by the U.S.
government for oversight over some of the Internet's centralized
functions, such as the allocation of domain names, the address system
and management of the Internet's 13 root servers, located around the
world.
This proposal gives one constituency, the domain name
registries, veto power over any ICANN decisions.
The proposal endorsed by WITSA includes some basic
principles, such as:
* the importance of ensuring geographical diversity in
participation;
* ensuring all the various constituencies have an equal voice
and
encouraging the development of minority perspectives; and,
* using a bottom up representational model of governance in
developing policy recommendations.
We would like as many additional endorsements as
possible by the time of the ICANN Board's meeting on March 3rd, when
we
expect they will make a decision on which proposal to accept related
to
how to structure the DNSO.
Please do not hesitate to contact Sheila O'Neill
(soneill@itaa.org <mailto:soneill@itaa.org> ) or Jon Englund
(jenglund@itaa.org <mailto:jenglund@itaa.org> ) with any questions.
Thank you.