[NCAP-Discuss] why enhanced controlled interruption - not legal

[James Galvin]

Speaking as co-Chair:

This discussion of the purpose and value of enhanced controlled interruption is essential.  As a group we need to understand all points of view, make sure to defend any choice we make, and mention relevant counterpoints so the community understands why we made our choice.

Toward that end I want to remind us that this is a technical group and we ultimately will make the best technical choice we can based on the data we have at hand.

There are legal questions associated with the use of enhanced controlled interruption.  There are related business, privacy, and liability questions.  These questions have very limited scope in our work.  It is appropriate for us to note the questions and suggest future study of them, but in general it is not within scope for us to resolve them.

Let’s remind ourselves as to why enhanced controlled interruption (ECI) is part of our currently proposed solution.

We have been asked to provide guidance on how to assess name collisions and consider what mitigation and remediation might be possible.  The data we have tells us the following.

1. Root servers do not have a full picture of name collisions by themselves.

2. What we do know from root servers is only from DNS queries and that information is waning as the DNS infrastructure evolves.

Those two facts alone tell us the development of a mitigation and remediation plan is problematic at best.

ECI exists because it is currently the only mechanism that has been proposed to obtain sufficient information to develop a mitigation or remediation plan.  We can certainly note the additional risks that the ICANN Board will need to consider, that are outside the technical scope of our work.

Or, if another mechanism or procedure manifests in our discussions, then we’ll certainly consider that.

I don’t want to repeat discussion we’ve already had.  As we develop text for our final work product all of this will get discussed again and captured appropriately.  Please do continue the discussion on the list as it will inform our final work product.

Thanks,

Jim