Patrick Vande Walle said:
This is where I think ICANN could and should be more active in fostering and sponsoring new research aimed at designing a new Internet, targeting the general public good, with no short term economic considerations. Granted, I do not expect ICANN to do the work of the IETF. However, I think it is not necessarily a good thing to let the engineers be in charge of everything, from the general vision to specifications and implementation. There needs to be a top level vision, a master plan of what we want the Internet to be in 10 years time.
Can I also add my voice of support to this point of view? Having attended ICANN Paris & IETF Dublin, I have realised how little cooperation there is between those two constituencies. Worse, there is much distrust from either side, often brought forth by individual feuds as well as misunderstanding of issues (and of each other). IMHO it is time to bridge the gap, especially since challenges that lie ahead of us are somehow far greater than anything we've had to tackle so far and many of those challenges incorporate a mixed technical/political side to them. I'm thinking DNS stability in the face of lots more gTLDs as well as increased brute force hacking capability, IPv4 to IPv6 transition, Network Neutrality, etc. I don't need to list them all here: the ALAC is well informed. O. -- Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond, Ph.D. E-mail:<ocl@gih.com> | http://www.gih.com/ocl.html