After attending the afternoon ICANN Security & Stability Committee meeting, I realized that the issues involved fall into several related but independent dimensions. Shy person that I am *Cough*, I have opinions in all, but I think it's worthwhile simply to be able to explain the Big Picture to media and other folk that aren't immersed in our field.
In these notes, I'm trying to maintain neutrality about the issues. I do have strong opinions about most, but I'll post those separately, often dealing with one issue at a time. For those of you new to the media, it's often best to put things into small, related chunks.
1. Governance issues
(top posting because I'm citing a fairly lengthy chunk of Howard's
dissertation below)
This is a really good, dispassionate summation, in my personal opinion.
I would like to comment on issue #2...
Granting solely for the sake of argument that there was no legal
obstacle to Verisign's action, it seems that there were at least three
approaches for them to choose from in rolling out the wildcard/
Sitefinder scheme:
1) Although no protocol changes were involved, submit an IETF draft a
'la the RFC process and at least get some working group discussion if
not formal RFC action. Rationale is that the operational impact of this
type of action at the TLD level is equally as critical to the
infrastructure as the protocol issues normally dealt with by IETF.
2) Discuss in good faith and in advance with ICANN prior to
implementing.
3) Treat it as a corporate operational policy issue....like when big
Tier 1's have modified peering policy in the past...."people might not
like it but they can't stop us from doing it."
Obviously option 3 is the most aggressive and most unilateral approach.
And just as obviously, there is plenty of precendent and procedure in
favor of options 1 and 2 that would have leapt out as being more
responsible
to any objective person.