There is more to ALAC than just domain name registrants or domain name users. We all use IP addresses. The fact that IPv4 space has been in limited availability over those last years has left us, individual users, with an ever changing public IP address. The main consequence of this is that we still have a rather centralized Internet, because we cannot do away with servers for just about anything we want to do. If any Internet user could have a reasonably fixed IPv6 address or address range, this would allow a radical change in the way the Internet users interact. Just think that your local e-mail server could just accept connections from about 200 trusted IP addresses of known friends or relatives. This would certainly help eliminate spam. I am not sure though that there is much to discuss about IP address allocation policies within the framework of ICANN, because each RIR has its own policy. RALOs would also need to talk to their RIR. Patrick Vande Walle John L wrote:
I have always found a major lack of agreement about who the at-large is supposed to be.
One group believes it is the domain registrants who are not part of other constituencies, which more or less means individuals (like me) who register personal vanity domains.
The other group believes that it's all the Internet users who are not parts of other consitutencies, all the people who have never registered a domain and never will, but use domains every day when they use the Internet.
In a lot of areas, the interests of these two groups are the same, e.g., we all would prefer that our registrars were competent and honest. But in a lot of other areas, they aren't, with WHOIS being the most obvious place.
Am I the only one who thinks that non-registrants count, or is ALAC a club for vanity registrants?
Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.
-- Patrick Vande Walle Chairman Internet Society Luxembourg Web site: http://www.isoc.lu Blog: http://patrick-vande-walle.eu Jabber me at patrick@isoc.lu