At 12:02 PM 3/29/99 -0500, Jay Fenello wrote:
>Nice to see you up to your old tricks

"Tricks" involve deception and misrepresentation.  Kent and the rest of us 
are studiously trying to correct the stream of misinformation that you are 
disseminating, so yes there are tricks, but you should be a bit more 
introspective about asserting their source.

>The correction that I agreed with was
>that the IAHC did not "claim" ownership
>over the entire name space.  On the other
>hand, I do believe that it *would* have
>been a consequence of that failed and
>faulty plan.

In other words, the facts were not at all what you said they were, but 
rather were an unstated projection of some mystical, personal future, 
without any offer of basis.

>IMHO, that was a minor point, one that *I*

You claim that someone is going to "take over" a major Internet resource, 
but that the issue is only a minor point?  What a fascinating perspective 
on relative importance.

Then again, it probably is an accurate reflection of your sense of things.


In any event, Jay, I hope that it is not a matter of your own "tricks" that 
accounts for your failure to respond to the earlier, detailed listing of 
factual errors in your original note.

In case you missed that listing, here it is again:


At 05:58 AM 3/26/99 -0500, Jay Fenello wrote:
>NSI is being targeted financially, and its officers are
>being threatened with potential criminal actions.  These
>tactics are being used to break NSI's resolve to fight
>for a competitive name space, and to force NSI to be
>subservient to ICANN.

That's pretty good.  NSI as the protector of a competitive market.

Of course, we should not let the minor fact that NSI has no experience with 
competition get in the way of the purity of its goals to act as the 
free-market conscience of the Internet, should we?

Nor should we pay any attention to the fact that this sermon, on behalf of 
NSI, was delivered to us by an unacknowledged, paid agent of NSI, nor that 
that agent has no experience with Internet administrative processes but 
proffers views that suggest expertise.

Yes, I'll spare you further commentary.  The "article" doesn't warrant more.

However, the factual errors in the "article" do warrant correction, besides 
providing more substantiation for the lack of expertise by its author:


At 05:58 AM 3/26/99 -0500, Jay Fenello wrote:
>NSI's stock plunged in response.

NSI's stock was plunging before the announcement.

>The U.S. Government, through various defense contractors,
>started the Internet.  Over time, it moved into the research

The Internet, in the form of the Arpanet, began in the research community, 
but with funding from the U.S. department of defense.  As I recall, of the 
first four sites, two were academic research and two were independent 
research.  None were military.  There were some military sites added, 
later.  Eventually, they were partition into Milnet, when the Arpanet 
became the Internet, in January 1983.

>community, finally ending up in the commercial realm.  It also
>moved from a U.S. based collection of networks, to a global
>collection of networks.  As these changes occurred, it out grew

The Arpanet and then Internet have ALWAYS had a significant component of 
international participation, with the earliest participation being notable 
from England and Norway, but quickly expanding to incude other 
countries.  Commercial involvement began in the late 1980's.

>The gTLD-MoU was controversial because it would have
>confiscated all generic Top Level Domains, not only from

IANA was ALWAYS in charge of domain name administration.  The gTLD-Mou was 
developed under IANA authority.  As such, the inflammatory term 
"confiscated" is factually incorrect.

>startups like IO Design (who had been running the .web
>registry for approximately one year), but also from Network
>Solutions.  It would have established an authority control
>model of governance, and it claimed ownership over the

The authority structure over domain name administration was in place from 
the inception of the DNS, with IANA in charge from the start.  The gTLD-MoU 
represented no change at all to that model, since the gTLD-MoU was 
performed as an agency of IANA.

>After many complaints from the Internet community, the
>U.S. Government, through Ira Magaziner, intervened with
>both the Green and White Paper processes.  The result of
>these processes was the White Paper, a document that was
>surprisingly supported by virtually the entire Internet
>community.

This piece of history neglects to mention Magaziner's first draft, the 
Green Paper, which specified extreme micro-management of an evolution 
process and the resulting administration, so the White Paper actually 
represents a massive change in tone and direction by the U.S. 
Government.  Unfortunately, the most serious damage done by the Green Paper 
was to destabilize the authority of IANA, which had been solid for more 
than 10 years; we won't be recovering from that destabilization for some years.

>With these guidelines, ICANN has, in effect, claimed
>ownership over the entire gTLD name space.  They have

ICANN authority is coming from the same place that we were just told had 
all this support, namely the White Paper.

>IMHO, the problems we are seeing are directly caused
>by an overly aggressive ICANN trying to break the only

Overly aggressive?

Remember what the original motivation was?  New names?  That was FIVE YEARS 
ago.

It's difficult to see something that should take 6 months instead taking 
more than 5 years and calling the actions overly aggressive.

>What the spin doctors are conjuring up is a choice

The only spin doctoring we are seeing, here, is from this "article".

(Whoops.  I promised no more commentary, except about factual errors.)

>NSI has consistently acted in a professional manner,

If you don't count their refusal to participate in any of the early, open 
discussions, their refusal to participate in open discussion and review 
about their precipitous changes to long-established DNS operations, and if 
you ignore their periodic operational errors that render one or another 
part of the DNS or its WHOIS database useless, then yes, NSI has been 
wonderfully professional.

>On the other hand, the "Investment Research Company's"
>Report sure looks like it was written by ICANN's PR firm.

And this "article" doesn't look like it was written by NSI's???

d/


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