Eric,

I have a different recollection of the Wildcard issue, and a different understanding of SSAC 032.  

My clear recollection was that the Board challenged the Verisign Wildcard proposal on stability and security grounds, prohibited its use – BY gTLD REGISTRY OPERATORS – on those grounds, and issued the New Registry Services review review process (found in registry agreements) in response.  

SSAC 032 on Redirection does not appear to me to regulate anyone.  In SSAC 032, the advisory committee “encourages the community to consider the broad implications of turning negative responses into revenue opportunities without consideration of the operational consequences and without consideration for the wishes of either registrants or clients of DNS data.”  While conveying the reasoned views of DNS security experts, nothing about the report amounts to “regulation” by my read.  It does not regulate down stream DNS server operators either directly (how could it?) or indirectly through registry operators.  Nor am I aware that ICANN has attempted to use SSAC 032 for that purpose.

So, as I read this, ICANN’s opposition to the Verisign Wildcard program on stability and security grounds falls squarely within ICANN’s Mission as stated in the current CCWG proposed text, and nothing about ICANN’s actions in this regard would appear to be in conflict with the proposed language precluding regulation of services that use the Internet’s unique identifiers to enable or facilitate their reachability over the Internet or the content such services provide.

Becky

J. Beckwith Burr
Neustar, Inc. / Deputy General Counsel & Chief Privacy Officer
1775 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington D.C. 20006
Office: +1.202.533.2932  Mobile: +1.202.352.6367 / neustar.biz


From: Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@abenaki.wabanaki.net>
Date: Sunday, November 8, 2015 at 9:21 PM
To: Accountability Community <accountability-cross-community@icann.org>
Subject: [CCWG-ACCT] Fwd: Re: regulatory/mission issue WS2

Colleagues,

Correspondence which inadvertently didn't go to the archived ccwg-acct list. My response to Malcolm, followed by Malcolm's query.

Eric Brunner-Williams
Eugene, Oregon


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: [CCWG-ACCT] regulatory/mission issue WS2
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2015 10:43:36 -0800
From: Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@abenaki.wabanaki.net>
To: Malcolm Hutty <malcolm@linx.net>
CC: accountability-cross-community-bounces@icann.org 


Malcolm,

That bell has already rung. SSAC 032 has been published. The Board took 
note of SiteFinder. More generally, the Corporation acted to prevent 
correct resolutions causing harm in the case of the Conficker.C variant.

Still more generally, "we" (the "community") routinely produce 
informational RFCs and Best Current Practices documents addressing 
resolver operators, as well as others.

The "means to ensure continuous correct resolution" is not limited to 
"the authority to direct, in a compulsory sense, the operators".

I suggest that this detour into my opinion on the rights of ISPs doesn't 
illuminate the "what's a service?" question Becky and others are 
struggling with. My point was we could be specific about what we're not 
regulating, which I suspect means "content", not ASN filtering, not 
route filtering, and not filtering forward and backwards name-to-address 
resolution.

Finally, the issue is not what our work product has been, and to what 
effect, but what it will be, after some transition. As I observed in the 
conclusion of the note from which you picked the quote below, the 
possibility of future work on resolution is obsoleted by the sweeping 
prohibition language, with the exception as others have mentioned, 
through contracts.

Cheers,
Eric Brunner-Williams
Eugene, Oregon



On 11/6/15 4:30 PM, Malcolm Hutty wrote:
> On 2015-11-06 22:09, Eric Brunner-Williams wrote:
>>
>>  First, could we narrow what it is we're not regulating, ISPs do a lot
>> of things, but one thing they can do is operate recursive resolvers,
>> so in particular, the "no authority to regulate" means no means to
>> ensure continuous correct resolution of domain names by ISPs.
>
> Eric,
>
> Are you of the opinion that ICANN does in fact have the authority to 
> direct,
> in a compulsory sense, the operators of name resolvers such as ISPs in
> how to operate them?
>
> Malcolm.