Kim is correct as to the language, but the ramifications of the changes invoked intense feelings at the time. Small as they were, the changes were seen as very significant. At the time, especially with the introduction of the GAC, the relative levels of trust by ccTLD managers for the late Jon Postel on the one hand (high trust), and ICANN and the GAC on the other (low trust), could hardly have been more opposite. The idea that RFC 1591 needed to be restated at all, and the fact that ICANN had decided that it could issue unilateral policy, even if they were called clarifications or updates, seemed quite suspect to many. Why this new-fangled IPC, why not another RFC? Why was no-one consulted? (I'm sure there were people who were consulted, it's just that none of them were the ccTLD managers I knew, which was a lot of them.) These were the questions on people's lips. Furthermore, ICANN, which had been created by fiat by the US government, and whose board was chosen by a process which remains shadowy to this day, supplanted an earlier effort, the gTLD-MoU, which for all its faults very specifically did not govern ccTLDs at all. So this ICANN, this new organization, was suddenly given a broad remit which had expanded to include country codes, and the first thing the ccTLD managers saw from ICANN was a document which "clarified" RFC 1591. The explanation from ICANN was never very convincing -- Mike Roberts explained that it changed nothing, but could not offer much of an explanation of why, if it changed nothing, it was needed at all. And in fact it was precisely that sentence from the ccTLD News #1, about the role of governments, that was for the ccTLD audience the most significant change. It is not too difficult to imagine why there was some paranoia. Remember also that at the venue where IPC-1 was first explained to the ccTLD managers-- at the Berlin ICANN meeting -- Paul Twomey, then the newly-minted head of the GAC, gave some frightening answers to questions after his maiden speech, in which he declared, among other things, that even if a government was an international disgrace (Pol Pot's Cambodia was the example), it had all rights to do whatever it liked with a ccTLD, and that a government was, by virtue of its control of its territory, de facto and de jure legitimate and its decisions beyond appeal. He also compared ICANN to the Treaty of Versailles, which he reckoned was a great success. It was as if, for Twomey, the consequence of Treaty of Versailles -- World War II -- could not detract from his admiration of it. And this was the man who would guide the GAC, which it appeared had just been given a great deal of power by ICANN and IPC-1. It was all a bit surreal and very tense. As I said, at that time the confidence level was extremely low.... It appeared to many that things could have taken a very quick turn for the worse. Happily they did not. Antony On Oct 4, 2009, at 7:49 PM, Kim Davies wrote:
On 4/10/09 4:15 PM, "Antony Van Couvering" <avc@avc.vc> wrote:
At one point we had over 80 ccTLDs give their explicit support of our stand to honor RFC 1591 and to reject what seemed like ICANN's shift toward government control, embodied in ICANN's IPC-1.
Just to clarify the record. Any shift toward 'governmental control' predates ICANN. There is not a single word in ICP-1 that was not derived from the pre-ICANN era, and the solitary sentence on the role of governments is from Jon Postel.
Language lawyers may be interested in the attached comparison, extracted from a draft document I am in the process of writing.
kim
<1591vicp1.pdf>