Disclaimer: I speak for me and me only. These are my personal opinions. I was around in the early days of the Internet creation and remember some of what was said and what happened. It sounds like (from the emails) that only a few others were also there, most have come to the table much later. As one example of early day change that happened, .com was supposed to be for commercial entities only and you had to have a machine connected (or ready to be connected) to the network to get a domain name. That changed pretty suddenly as people saw the potential money to be made. In the same light, ccTLDs were an attempt to provide countries with their own piece of the Internet, not as a commodity to be sold. The ccTLDs were handed out to those who understood what was coming, which was not always the governments. Individuals got control of many ccTLDs, many of which still keep control. The intent, which I believe is correct, is that each country would get their own .xx.. Like it or not, this is an issue of national sovereignty. I also believe that this feeds directly into the issue of local languages being available on the net. If *.yy were controlled by the local country of yy, all the sites on .yy could be in the language of yy. Seems like a no-brainer. This should be a priority issue for us, in spite of other issues of importance. It is a problem for me when ICANN signs over the control of a .yy to an individual or company just because they ask for it. If it belongs to the country, the country should get control of it. If the country then wants to contract out the running of .yy to that individual or company, so be it. The people of the country ought to have a say in what happens - that is more like the multi-stakeholder issue at the local level and of course more democratic. ICANN has pretty much ignored the issue of ccTLDs until a report by Garth was read at Sydney, which caused a large, nasty backlash, followed by an RFP from ICANN to do a study on the ccTLDs. The backlash on this mailing list is similar. My opinion is that there are people set to lose money, so they are doing what they can to silence discussion and sunshine. There are also people who are trying to keep the status quo for personal reasons. Just to be clear, I believe that the Internet's first priority is that of a public good and profits second. It appears that a strong constituency believes the inverse, which will do and say whatever to discredit anyone questioning them. (And yes, I can give names and events involving me, if you want - contact me off list) I would be happy if every country in the world would make sure that they were in control of their own ccTLD. Sorry about the others who took advantage of the lack of understanding and exploited these countries in the early days. Now the countries seem to get it, thus should take back control. I am also sorry that some countries are run by horrible people, but that is a political issue for governments to work on. Perhaps routing from a country could become a sanction... Some of this group's members do not understand some details, so those people should read up a little bit before saying things. For example, the IANA list of contacts for ccTLDs is way out of date and is inaccurate in many cases. This ought to be fixed before anyone uses it as a source. The fact that some countries use US resources as a backup does not change the other facts that several US citizens run ccTLDs from the US. It merely shows a lack of transparency, as well as a messy bit of bookkeeping - which should be fixed. (It is not only US citizens, but citizens from other countries - not the ccTLD country -who run the ccTLD). This is a serious problem that should not be ignored, as it has been for years. --bob bruen