[CCWG-ACCT] What do we mean by "service"?

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 01:59:11PM -0800, Eric Brunner-Williams wrote:

> What distinguishes our area of work from all others (that I can think of off
> the top of my head, and some five decades of programming, mostly distributed
> systems), is that the uniqueness of the identifiers (and we can ignore
> protocol parameters, which need not necessarily be "numbers", btw), both
> "names" and "numbers", doesn't take on any particular "uniqueness" meaning
> until the prefix for any particular name-to-address mappings are announced
> and can be referenced from "elsewhere".

I agree with this and the rest of your message; but as I tried to
point out in the meeting the other day, for our purposes I don't think
the distinction you're making matters.  We're trying to say that ICANN
isn't allowed to regulate services on the Internet.  You're pointing
out that some services aren't on the Internet.  If we define
"services" in this case so that it includes "on the Internet" and "not
on the Internet", then ICANN is not allowed to regulate services on
the Internet or not on the Internet.  This achieves our goal ("on the
Internet" being a subset) and has the additional benefit that ICANN
can't regulate other things either (not that anyone seemed to suggest
they could).

But I could well be overlooking something.  Is there a reason you want
to make the distinction that's relevant to the task at hand?

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com