Vint Cerf just said we won't get to WSIS today.  Had we opened the mike on this subject, this is what I planned to say:

I wonder if you remember the Spruce Goose.  Howard Hughes created the largest aircraft ever built -- capable of carrying 750 fully-equipped troops or two Sherman tanks.

It took a long time.  And a lot of money.  And it wasn't finished until well after the war was over.

Finally, in 1947, with Howard Hughes flying the thing, the Spruce Goose took off.  For a mile, about 70 feet off the surface of the water.

That plane had a task -- to fly -- a core issue it was supposed to deal with.  At enormous expense, it finally dealt with that task, AFTER the war was over.

Here, the UN is styling ICANN as "the present arrangement" -- new blood to come later, when governments are in charge.

The thing is, many governments have an advantage over ICANN when it comes to regulating the net.  They only prohibit things by passing laws, not by failing to act.  ICANN was supposed to get this same advantage through the consensus policy regime -- adopting very few consensus policies, and leaving the rest to local control.  Plus, ICANN was supposed to have flexibility that governments don't have.

ICANN has a great opportunity now.  It needs to operate with self restraint.  The default setting has to be "everything not prohibited is permitted."  Otherwise, it will look WORSE than governments.  That would be an enormous shame.

Back to the Goose.  It's job was to fly, but that core mission got a little lost -- it tried to fly BIG. 

Two suggestions for you:  Stick to your job and have your finances tie to that job.

ICANN's job is to create a good, objective, yearly process for new TLDs.  That's not easy, as we've discussed.  And to run IANA well.

The financial goals of ICANN should be tied much more towards looking inward (less arbitrary processes, good at new TLDs) than going outward to fight with ITU (the enormous funds you're raising look like you're building another Spruce Goose).

Many people who consider themselves friends of the internet will align with you, but only if you act right.

What will the netizens think about you -- A failed experiment?  Or a timeless embodiment of net values?  This is the moment -- between now and 2006.

Will they thank you for carefully preserving the TLD string space?

Will they support you for regulating business models?

BUT:  Will they applaud you for keeping at bay all the forces that seek to control the net -- in the name of intellectual property, or sovereignty, or straight-out greed and control?  Yes, they will.

Congress killed the Spruce Goose project, and the aircraft never flew again.  The project was a failure. 

"You have not tried a free and market process.  You have done almost everything else.  You have shut the market down completely. You have tried trickling in additions through painful and laborious beauty contests.... However, there is a glimmer of hope...I heard Kleinsin say he saw no technical stability concerns about the addition of ten to 20 new TLDs to the root a year.  ...It's clear that these technical concerns go away if we add something in the neighborhood of tens of top level domains per year." 

"I submitted a paper a year ago calling for the annual addition of 40 TLDs.  Isn't this something we could agree to?  Something between 10 and 40 a year?  This is progress.  . . . The one part of this that doesn't fit into a smooth transition is the board's involvement in the content of a TLD.  My proposal talked about a trademark-oriented dispute resolution process for new TLDs.  You can set up a challenge process, and that can deal with a lot of the issues."

Kleinsin:  "From a technical restriction standpoint, I could throw my shoe at you.  [milton: you've done that]  There are a number of policy constraints that keep me from doing that.  The ability to do something technically is not a reason to do it."

We've been talking about new TLDs for some time today.  It's 1999!  Joe Sims is here.  Ken Fockler is here. Where is Chris Ambler? 

In response to a statement from Elliot Noss, Vint goes on [paraphrasing]: 

"The notion that DNS is a business was surely not in its original design.  Today it is.  As a business, it's very different from the engineering design.  But engineering still has to work.  I have different views because I'm worrying about it always working.  The architecture was planned to be very hierarchical." 

How many new TLDs would it take to break the net, Elliot asks? 

There have been reports, Vint says.  Kleinsin jumps in [paraphrasing]:  "There's a third dimension.  People say, "Gee, it would be great to experiment."  We don't want to turn the DNS into an experimental laboratory.  We can't justify that on a stability basis." 

Vint to Elliot:  all is not lost.  This is a discussion, not a decision. 

Elliot:  You're hesitating here, but you're not telling me how many will break the net.  Tell me. 

Kleinsin:  my personal opinion is that experimental allocations of domain names (ways of doing allocations) are frightening to me.  Even one is frightening to me.  There have been several pieces of advice to the community that indicate that in terms of preserving DNS stability it is safe to add chunks of 10 tlds without any effect on stability.  But, says Kleinsin, there are other people who worry about upper limits -- those are very large compared to existing numbers of domains.  We could do anything in the same order of magnitude of current domains without an effect on stability.  My distinction, says Kleinsin, is that I'd like to see more justification for doing this than Gee, there is an opportunity here. What we're being given isn't enough justification -- we need broad guarantees to make certain that an effect of failure is zero impact.  [so complete safety has to be assured] The more flighty an application seems in terms of its approach, the more I'd like to have to comfort me on the risk side of the equation. 

Vint again:  there's quite a difference between processing at top level and processing at second-third levels.  Reason:  amount of coordination and management of root zone.  Scaling is much harder there. But we could double the numbers of TLDs without much effect on stability. 

Mohamed Diop:  I'm not seeing destabilization of the DNS through expansion.  This is the only issue ICANN has full responsibility for.  No one will give us the chance to recuse ourselves.  We can't declare that we can't do this job.  Someone else will show up to take on this domain business.  A core value of ICANN is to enable competition and choice.

Ivan Campos:  We're getting applications to do things that the DNS was not designed to do.

Roberto Gaetano:  I joined this organization 8 years ago in the hope of creating new TLDs to compete with .com.  We've missed that train.  Com continues to be dominant.  Do we NEED new TLDs?  Of course not.  Nor did we need cars when we had horses.  But I haven't seen enough information to see market benefits of new TLDs.  Now, with the changed situation at the end of 2004, someone who is serious about launching new TLDs should come with reliable market figures.  I am still in favor of the introduction of new TLDs, but I'm more cautious now. One thing we need to make sure is that the introduction of new TLDs should do no harm -- I'm with Kleinsin on this.  How would new TLDs do harm?  Well, with excuse of innovation, they could bend the DNS to do systems that it wasn't designed for.  And they could put ICANN in a situation where not having well-defined rules for new TLD applications puts us at real risk.  Then we'll be forced to delegate thousands that are more or less of the same type, or we'll be at risk of litigation.  So that worries me.

Vint Cerf [paraphrasing]:  "I'm becoming concerned about what the philosophical basis is for new TLDs.  Why do we need any?"

I respect Vint, but this is really not his job.  Other people want to create new TLDs.  The market will decide whether they succeed or fail.  Artificial scarcity of new TLDs has gotten a lot of people awfully excited.

all comments solicited.

Doug Barton puts on his IANA hat.  (Once, in Shanghai, Louis Touton actually physically DID put on an IANA hat in order to report on IANA.  Since he was answering all the phones, editing the web site, and generally doing all the work at ICANN, perhaps the physical hat was necessary.  Doug's hat is virtual.)

Doug shows a chart noting that of 197 requests received in 2004 for root management requests, 167 have been completed, and response time is shortening.

He now shows a dramatic picture showing how old the items in the queue are.  It looks like a mountain range.  The biggest mountains have to do with IPv6 glue requests.

"We don't want to rush to conclusion those items that require more deliberation."  But response time is going down.  And reporting is going up.

Note:  there has been no public comment -- so far -- on the strategic plan.  The room is very large.  I'm hoping that the size of the place and the monotony of some of these reports won't dampen public comment.

Kurt Pritz gets up to talk about the status of new sTLDs (sponsored top level domains -- current examples are .aero, .coop, and .museum).  They've received ten applications (including .xxx and .tel), and have had them reviewed by outside reviewers.  Two of these have moved right into negotiation -- .travel and .post.

The remaining eight are going through lots of commentary.  Of course, none of them has been formally rejected.  [No applications are ever formally rejected.  Even the applicants from September 2000 are supposedly still live. ed.]

When this process ends, someday, ICANN will publish results so as to "inform the implementation of the strategy for the formation of new gTLDs."

We really really need a predictable, "thin," objective process for new TLDs.  ICANN should be opening 10 a year, or more.  Some will fail.  We'll have a buddy system in place to protect registrants.  The existing process is very resource-intensive for ICANN and does not put the organization in the best light. 

Paul Twomey reports that ICANN staff is getting 145,000 emails a day.  "A lot of that is spam."

Also says that ICANN has "operationally gotten less responsive over the last six to eighteen months."  His suggestion is that "organizations tend to experience a tipping point where systems and processes are overwhelmed by the complexity that the organization faces."  So ICANN has to become stronger and larger.

Alex Pisanty introduces Frank Fowlie (fowlie@icann.org) as the new ombudsman.  Fowlie seems like a good egg.  He is not the same thing as the late lamented Independent Review Panel (still required under ICANN's contracts with registries), because he will have no ability to effect change directly. 

Pisanty says formation of the IRP was "tactically and practically impossible."  There's a lot of history there -- in fact, insufficient effort was put into making it work.  And there was a great deal of concern that creation of the IRP, which would investigate whether there was actually documented consensus behind a particular policy to be imposed on registries or registrars under contract with ICANN, would in effect create an "super board."  

Fowlie will not even be looking at that question -- he'll be (without staff support, as far as I can tell) taking on board whatever questions show up from people concerned about ICANN actions.

Tough job.

Fowlie is now speaking, emphasizing his independence and relevant experience (which is substantial).  He'll report to the Board as a whole, not to staff, and has to produce an annual report.  He'll have a web-based complaint-taking system.  He'll try to help parties to mutual settlements.  He'll have power to make recommendations to the Board. 

"How can a single practitioner office [do this]?"  He'll rely on his experience and he'll be independent.  And he'll be busy.