The process called the International Forum on the White Paper (IFWP) appears to have hit the buffers, for now at least. On Friday morning when we spoke to people at Harvard University who were organizing and hosting the final meeting, an invitation list was being drawn up for the closed part on September 12-13, which was to produce a document to present to the US government as an alternative that was to be debated at a public meeting on September 19. By the afternoon, it appears the decision had been made by the Berkman Center at Harvard to cancel both meetings. The following morning that decision was relayed to the members of the steering committee of the IFWP by Berkman professor Jonathan Zittrain. He said Network Solutions Inc (NSI) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) have found some common group between their two proposals and wish to continue talking about them privately. They will presumably publish some sort of draft document, although it’s not clear how public comment will be included. The two apparently started talking at the beginning of last week, which was confirmed to us by NSI. For those unfamiliar with this subject, NSI runs the InterNic registry where .com, .net and .org domains are exclusively registered and IANA allocates blocks of IP addresses to regional numbering authorities, ISPs and large corporations and also runs some of the country-specific domains. Throughout the summer the two organizations have been disagreeing about the right way to privatize the whole process and break up NSI’s monopoly while retaining stability. The idea is produce some articles of incorporation and bylaws for a non-propfit entity to administer the domain name system (DNS). IANA produced a plan that is now on its third draft and the NSI produced one as a reaction to the IANA plan, which it felt did not deal with the issue of appointing directors of the new entity properly, among other problems. NSI’s senior VP, Don Telage recently called IANA’s approach of telling the internet community what was good for it as communist (08/27/98). Two things seem to have swayed the Harvard people into axing the meeting. IANA, which had never committed to attending, finally said that it definitely would not be coming; and then NSI went from a ‘yes’ to a non-committal response when it found out about IANA’s definite ‘no’. However, as both were talking almost a week ahead of the cancellation, suspicious minds have detected collusion between NSI and IANA. Word is that presidential internet adviser and co-author of the white paper Ira Magaziner called IFWP meeting chair professor Tamar Frankel and IANA boss Jon Postel and told them to get their act together the week before NSI and IANA started talking. Frankel would not confirm that, but she did say there may have been an expression of desire on the part of Magaziner and his team for some sort of closure to be organized quickly. She added that both her serices and those of the Berkman center are still at the disposal of the players involved. We attended the first IFWP meeting in Reston, Virginia in early July and have followed the other three and talked to the players constantly. All of whom – with the exception of IANA – which prefers not to talk to us at all, have reiterated their commitment to an open process. NSI says it is hopeful that elements of the IFWP process can be included in its talks with IANA. Some supporters of the IFWP, however, worried that the consensus points reached at the various meetings, still intend to press ahead with an open meeting on September 19. NSI says it would still be interested in attending that if it thought it would be worthwhile. Jay Fenello of private registry Iperdome Inc says he is trying to convince the IFWP steering committee to support the September 19 meeting, which would give it more of an air of legitimacy and only the strongly-pro IANA people on the committee have said no to this suggestion thus far, apparently. The government white paper that sparked the meetings and drafts calls for a bottom-up process built on consensus within the internet community. But the deadline of September 30 for something to happen is approaching fast and the two big guns have obviously decided that it can be done better in private than in a room of 20-30 ‘stakeholders.’ Professor Frankel says, these are crucial days, in my opinion.
