On 4/10/09 2:30 PM, "John R. Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Hmmn. Can you identify any occasion when ICANN or its predecessors ever refused to make a change a government wanted to make to the management of its TLD? (I don't know if they turned down changes that were technically impossible, e.g., DNS records with syntax errors or delegation to name servers that didn't exist, but we can ignore those if they happened.)
I'd go further, and estimate that the majority of cases where a government has come to ICANN and asked to transfer the country's ccTLD to them - it has not resulted in a change. For the sake of argument we can loosely bundle governments into two camps - those who are familiar with the workings of ICANN and ccTLD principles, and those who aren't. For the latter, they will often assume that the policy is that upon their request we simply transfer the domain however they desire. When ICANN gets such requests, they are advised of the policies and requirements, which include substantive engagement and relevant consensus within the local Internet community. Many governments, once aware of this, will not pursue it any further. Others will rethink, and sometimes then engender a proper community dialogue. In some cases the governments then facilitated a process, usually over a few years, which later resulted in a successful redelegation to some trustee (usually some non-profit in the community) through a process the government helped spur. Now clearly the government wanted this to occur, it doesn't make it wrong. I wouldn't suggest it is a problem if the government wants to be involved, just that what they are proposing is in the public interest. DNS records with syntax errors, etc. do not sink redelegation requests, because it is usually a shift to a new entity who probably hasn't configured the zone at the time of assessment. Bear in mind in a redelegation, the transfer will only happen after ICANN approval, so ICANN can hardly expect a fully functional registry operation up-and-running without any guarantee the ICANN Board will approve the request. The kinds of technical evaluation that happen in these cases are more to do with their technical plans, staff expertise, the registry platform they intend to deploy and so forth. It is less to do with checking the function of NS records. kim