"Reporting to God"

Mon Mar 27 14:32:48 UTC 2006

very interesting suresh.

I read it and it does provide confirmations from my point of view on  
some things that I had only suspected.

The most significant  was that IBM and ATT were the corps that had  
gotten their hooks into Magaziner....  This happened between sept and  
december 1996.  That action had other IMPORTANT fall out - namely it  
cancelled the very carefully laid plans of the NSF to declare the  
network solutions cooperative agreement done a year early.  had that  
happened the feds would have lost whatever control they had.  (I  
published an issue on april 1, 1997 saying what the feds had done to  
the NSF.  I got email congratulating me on a brilliant april fools  
day issue.  Unfortunately it was true.... and not an april fools day  
joke.)   Maher is also dead wrong on his insinuations about the NSF  
doing backroom deals with SAIC and the USF gov't on charging for  
domain names.  I don't like SAIC any more than Maher but again I have  
documented from the direct sources involved at NSF that they could  
not have done otherwise than what they did.

A Maher does lift the curtain on what his trademark folk did and that  
is useful - confirming a bunch of what a lot of use who were not in  
THOSE rooms suspected.  I hear that ken cukier is working on a  
definitive history of this - it needs to be written for sure.  the  
consequences of what happened a decade ago have not yet fully played  
out and there was a lot more going on than just trademark.  The most  
important thing from my point of view to the kuallumpur meeting that  
maher mentions is that ARIN was announced to the world by jon  
postel.  Magaziner had hammered THAT out at a meeting of the FNC in  
washington a couple of weeks earlier.

anyway i have other things to do that rehash old history  - but  
thanks for pointing this out.  Maher does offer an interesting  
perspective that makes sense (from his point of view at least.)

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On Mar 27, 2006, at 8:22 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:

>
> This is from the ITU newslog ..
>
>> The Economist once said: "if the Net does have a God, he is  
>> probably Jon Postel."
>> David Maher, Senior Vice President, Law and Policy at PIR has  
>> published his
>> memoirs of the early day attempts to revamp the internet's domain  
>> name system,
>> which he has entitled Reporting to God. Ten years later, it  
>> appears that decisions
>> surrounding the DNS remain as equally controversial as in the  
>> mid-1990's.
>
> The Dave Maher memoirs are at
> http://chilit.org/Papers%20by%20author/Maher%20--%20Reporting%20to% 
> 20God.htm
>
> Also links to an old, deja vu inducing Economist article, posted on
> the IP list - http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/ 
> interesting-people/199702/msg00001.html
>
> -srs
>
> --
> Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists at gmail.com)
>
>