Gordon Cook <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> But now the other part of this picture also begins to come into
> focus. This is the curious insistence of folk like Vint Cerf, John
> Patick and Dave Farber to say that if ICANN does not succeed, the
> Internet and electonic commerce will fail. When asked for a thorough
> and reasoned explanation of why none of these men have an answer. I
> suspect that I know why. The answer is that the authority for DNS,
> IP number allocation and port assignment rested not in law but in the
> consensual agreement of the Internet community with Jon Postel. Now
> Postel is gone. The department of commerce without a shred of legal
> authority to do so has stepped up to and asserted like General Haig
> that it is in control now. It will hold the reigns of power until it
> can turn them over to ICANN. This is why ICANN must not fail because
> it would them be revealed to the world and especialy to investors in
> the high flying Internet stocks that no signle legal authority
> existed over the operaton of the Internet's address system.
Well, I don't expect statements like this to make the front pages of
the Wall Street Journal. :) However, in the event that the CEOs of Internet
500 companies did become aware of this, I imagine they would lobby for some
sort of Federal intervention to work out a domain name, IP address, and
protocol policy that did permit them to communicate, while maintaining the
existing agreements under which the NII was created. History tells us that
when this sort of thing happened in the past (frequency allocation), big
business came out on top.
--gregbo
