Dear friends, The debate on the extent of ICANN responsibilities, raises the question of the extent of ALAC reponsibilities. I have touched on that question several times on this list without any reaction. I will, therefore, pose it plainly. 1) france@large understands "@large" (ad largum, in latin) as the pilots (kubernetes) of Plato's cybernetics paradigm. The people who freely steer "in altum", or independently throughout the global distributed network. We translate it as the people that feel that they are the co-owners of the nets, wherein they apportion their resources, time, ideas, and money. They, therefore, are very often what Von Hippel introduced as "lead users" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_innovation>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_innovation - in particular in open source, standard, and architecture areas. Is this understanding common on this list and among ALS? 2) france@large considers its role to be to facilitate satisfactory support for these @large people by the different entities of the political (ICANN), technical (IETF), and their own grassroots governance, along the principles of proportionality and subsidiarity, in particular in: - reporting to the ICANN BoD about the needs, moods, and propositions of its @large members. - doing the the same with the IETF Area Directors and WG when their works impact the @large design, use, and manegement of their own system. - helping its @large members to study, document, test, deploy, and operate answers to the needs that they experiment on, which are not yet addressed elsewhere (which is the way the Internet has evolved since its inception). Are we in agreement? 3) to give an example, france@large members are generally dissatisfied with the IDN/IDNA approach as proposed by the IETF. As a result, AFNIC (.fr) has not yet implemented any lingual support. Several events have led to a debate on the issue, and to increased attendance of our concerned members (joined by some ISOC members) to the IETF/WG IDNABIS. - the Paris ICANN meeting, where ccNSO should finalise its "Fast Track" project - the IAB comment that stated the IDNA RFCs needed a refresh before any further deployment - the general progress of the digital convergence and semantic emergence - the R&D exploration over the years by four france@large projects of expertise (dot-root, AFRAC, MLTF, and 3166-4). We identified that IDNA was not going to addres our needs. We asked Vint Cerf (the Chair of the WG-IDNABIS) if he thought that IDNA could become the ML-DNS that we need. The resulting debate is posted at <http://wikidna.org/index.php?title=Is_IDNA_an_ML-DNS_to_be>http://wikidna.org/index.php?title=Is_IDNA_an_ML-DNS_to_be. It led to the mutual understanding that IDNA and ML-DNS were parallel efforts to be developed, in parallel, by the ITEF and @large community. To support that effort, we started the <http://ml-dns.org/>http://ml-dns.org site for a general debate within the @large community, together with ICANN and IETF, as they deemed it appropriate. Our concern is to help the expediting of IDNA by the IETF, as a first layer solution that is appropriate for the Anglo-Saxon users/systems, which have to interoperate with linguistic interlocutors. While working on a consistent ML-DNS solution (1) bringing the same QoS to scriptual/lingual users, as the regular DNS does for English ASCII users (2) having the capacity to transparently encapsulate the IDNA once it has finalised by the IETF. We would adopt the same logic when considering others issues. Releating with the appropriate Internet technical/political Governance, such as ICANN/GNSO, ccNSO, GAC. The same as we relate with IGF, IGF, Intlnet, MAAYA, UNESCO, ITU, etc. and have other specialized centers of expertise on RFID, local networking, sociolinguistic TLDs, multilinguistics, etc. Are we on the same wavelength? Thank you for your comments. jfc