[DT-F] URGENT: Several questions for DT-F

[Suzanne Woolf]

David, 

On Apr 17, 2015, at 12:30 PM, David Conrad <david.conrad at icann.org> wrote:

> Given this, I believe it is a valid question whether it should be treated
> with greater care than any other zone. I personally think so, thus believe
> having a two-party rule for root zone changes is appropriate. But this is,
> of course, personal opinion.

I think "greater care" and "a two-party rule" may or may not go together. It's a discussion we should have-- but in the interests of stability through the transition, it seems to me that we shouldn't have it now. The current system isn't an argument either way, for the reason you call out below.

My point was more that the mechanisms in place are not responses to that need. They predate it and may not in fact effectively answer it (as you say below). 

>> As best I can recall from "back then," there was no such "original
>> intent" in the decision to have IANA located in one organization in one
>> place and the machines that distributed the root zone located in another
>> organization and another place. It was undertaken, IIRC, for roughly the
>> same reasons as you'd hire Dyn or Verisign or CloudFlare to do your
>> corporate DNS today-- operational (including financial) practicality.
>> Rationales having to do with "governance" came later.
> 
> True, but "back then", non-trival portions of national economies did not
> depend on the Internet.

Yes, exactly-- no one then was thinking in terms of how things needed to be set up in order to support that situation, because it wasn't true then. The mechanisms in place today owe far more to history than to reasoned design of processes to meet today's constraints.

(I think we're in violent agreement on this point.)

The supposed "governance" advantages of the current system are more or less incidental, if not accidental, because:

> We do NOT have effective
> two-party control in the current system.  What we have is the appearance
> of two-party control, but the reality is that since there is no mechanism
> by which the change implemented can be compared to the change proposed
> prior to publication, an invalid root zone change can be published. 

….is also true.

I have no opinion yet on whether we *need* a multi-party rule of some kind for the root zone. (It seems likely that there are advantages that can't be obtained any other way, and that the risks/costs can be managed so the tradeoff is reasonable-- but I haven't done the analysis.) I have a strong opinion that the current system does work quite well, from multiple perspectives, and that for now, we should limit ourselves as much as we can to changes that will assure the system is no weaker post-transition than it is today.

I'm not sure what this means for the DT-F recommendation. I oppose institutionalizing the multi-party requirement primarily because I don't like to constrain future decisions unnecessarily, but I won't oppose consensus to the contrary.


best,
Suzanne