On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 01:28:50PM -0800, Rod Rasmussen wrote:
Agree with you here personally, but that said, we use ISO country codes for example since they are well established, published, and nearly universally accepted in many fields.
I think we use them because Jon Postel said so in RFC 1591, with the explicit reasoning, "The IANA is not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a country." The same RFC says that the selection was made knowing that there is a procedure, but without any comment on whether the procedure is any good. I think, in fact, that ICANN gets itself in trouble when it deviates from the principle, "Let someone else make that decision." We see this, for instance, in the rather tortured handling of IDN ccTLDs, which do not follow any particular standard and which have given the community a certain amount of (sometimes poorly-informed) grief as a result.
that decision that we’ve just followed ever since). I think Stephanie is looking at some fields as not having similarly accepted standards which would be applicable. I don’t think she’s advocating
I can certainly imagine fields where we'll have that problem ("Internet security professional" comes to mind, for instance: just about nobody competent in the area is going to accept the accdreditation rules likely to be invented by international treaties). But there are plenty of cases where there are bodies who seem to be treated by the affected parties as legitmate. All I am trying to argue is that we should have a strong preference for flipping each hot potato onto anyone who seems likely to catch it, without coming up with a lot of rules for whether they get to play in the game.
becomes a matter of ensuring that those fit, and someone has to make that evaluation in the end.
No, I am claiming quite explicitly that ICANN _should not_ make that evaluation. That's what RFC 1591 quite explicitly does not do. "Someone else has a rule, and it seems to be accepted, so we'll use that." And we don't even have the problem that 1591 had, which was that you needed exactly one authority. Maybe you have _two_ bodies who each claim to represent fly fishers, and their interests in the RDS. Each seems to have a critical mass, and neither seems to be overwhelmingly preferred. They both have criteria for membership. So, they both get to run a credential service for fly fishers, and the Fly Fishers' Association and the New Association of Fly Fishers each can run an OAuth service and accredit their members. They'll get whatever special treatment fly fishers are supposed to get (I hope none). Maybe -- maybe -- I can see an argument for requiring stronger consensus around the legitimacy of these credentialling bodies as the quantity of data thereby exposed gets greater. But I am sceptical that the ICANN community is in any position to develop realistic criteria here: we can't even come to any kind of conclusion in a reasonable time about something we do know about (RDS), so the potential to come to any kind of conclusion about accreditation criteria seems pretty low to me. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com