At the recent International Forum on the White paper (IFWP) meeting in Reston, Virginia, one of the few positive agreement to emerge was one to form a group of experts on corporate law to come up with some models for the non-profit entity to run the domain name system (DNS). It quickly became apparent in the two days of workshops that many at the meeting were not aware of the various types of non-profit entities there could be and that there are also some wide variations between state law in this area. It was generally agreed in Reston that Karl Auerbach, an internet veteran, Cisco Systems Inc employee, lawyer and engineer should try and form an ad-hoc group of experts to come up with some suggestions. Auerbach told us yesterday, however, that due to other commitments, things have been delayed a bit but he intends to get going on it this week. He says there have been some small and subtle events over the past few weeks that indicate that there will be a positive outcome regarding the formation of the entity but he couldn’t say what those events were. The next IFWP meeting is less than two weeks away: July 24 and 25 in Geneva.
