Luke said:
>
>  members.  Full details may be seen at www.intiaa.asn.au/dns.

I have a substantial problem with the following clause from this
document:

	    Seek declaration by the ACA as the manager of electronic
	    addressing for Internet communications services Under
	    legislation to take effect from July 1997, the ACA (the
	    body allocated regulatory management of the
	    telecommunications industry post deregulation, to be made
	    up of Austel and the Spectrum Management Authority) has the
	    power to appoint an organisation as manager of electronic
	    addressing for Internet communications services. Such an
	    appointment would confer upon the organisation governmental
	    authority.


This is utterly unrelated to DNS. It also points to a complete lack of
understanding of what an internet address is, how they are allocated and
what the substantive issues are surrounding IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. This
is not a matter for an ADNA body to attempt to regulate. The implications
for how Intiaa believe addresses should be obtained are not good. In the
context of a fully commercialized view of the .AU namespace...

Whilst the SMA has the power, it has NOT shown any intent to do such an
appointment, and this would be a retrograde act in my opinion. I would
expect vigorous opposition to this move to come from several quarters.


More directly relevant to DNS matters, this document fails to
understand the extent to which domains under .AU are a non-financial
issue but relate to provisioning of namespaces for public-interest
goals. Its statement regarding legacy domains (edu, oz, org, net, conf,
gov, asn) is weak, and the lack of statement regarding how similar
non-commercial domains can be instantiated very worrying. Financial
probity of DNA is very important, but so are the policy issues surronding
access to names and I believe the ACA and ACCC have a minor role to play
in most cases outside of business-related naming. 

I very strongly urge DNS list members to review the documents at

	http://www.iahc.org/

and consider the applicability of the MoU to this country. The MoU is
to be found at:

	http://www.iahc.org/gTLD-MoU.html

I urge attendees at the DNS meeting to reject a proposal to proceed
along the lines proposed so far in this document.  

I do not believe they are appropriate. Furthermore I do not believe
key stakeholders from domains such as csiro.au edu.au oz.au and gov.au
can achieve anything like convergeance on this proposal in the time
available.

About the only part of this process I can see support for is that the
ADNA voting  membership is restricted to not-for-profit bodies, and I
note that Intiaa proposes itself, ISOC-AU and at least three others.

I am interested in who these are perceived to be at this stage. If it
was the regional IA bodies, this would mean vesting the top-level domain
space of australia in a body dominated by ISPs or bodies themselves dominated
by ISPs and this is highly inappropriate. (If I mis-characterize the regional
IA bodies, please forgive me. This is my understanding at this time and I
welcome being set straight on that)

I do not believe that IANA or the current .AU nominee would see broad
community support in that proposal.

-George