By the time this is published there will be less than a week to go to the first part of the final wrap-up meeting in the International Forum on the White Paper (IFWP) series, designed to establish the framework of a non-profit entity to run the domain name system. September 12-13 will see a closed, invitation-only event at the Berkman Center at Harvard University’s law school. However, as of Friday, no invitations had been sent out but the people at Berkman, who are acting as the logistical coordinators and moderators of the meeting anticipate that by early this week the list of around 20 people will have been made public. A week later, on Saturday September 19 there will be an open, public meeting at Harvard, which anyone can attend and voice their opinion about the IFWP proposal. Sources there were reluctant to name any names that were already in the frame, but the obvious ones would be from Network Solutions Inc, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), Open Root Server Confederation (ORSC) and the Internet Society (ISOC). It is unlikely that any representatives from the US Government will be invited, as the feds have always maintained that this should be an entirely private process. And as the whole point of the exercise initiated by the White Paper in June is to rid the government of the responsibility of administering the DNS, it wouldn’t make much sense for it to be directly represented. The government has said that it only wants to see a single proposal from the internet community and if gets more than one it will lock people in a room until they get a single proposal straightened out. The IANA’s proposal is the main rival to whatever emerges from the IFWP. The Berkman people know that whoever it chooses there will be much complaining, which is something of an understatement. The trick will be to get a small enough group to be constructive while at the same time representing a broad enough cross-section of interested parties. There is also the problem, as exhibited ion the various mailing lists these people populate, of choosing people who will be constructive, rather than destructive.
