>Humour or not, it appears to be a particularly important
>matter to ISOC.  ADNA has .AU as its "space".  This doesn't
>mean it owns .AU, or even that it will one day own it. It
>just means that it is limited to operations within .AU.

That's just fine as an isolated statement. And not in dispute. The
statement "ADNA won't even work outside of .AU" is a much different one to
"ADNA will INITIALLY confine its activities to COM.AU while it earns
community support for its further (intended) activities in .AU".

>
>This is much the same as ISOC-AU calling itself the "Internet
>Society of Australia".  Does this mean you claim all of
>Australia?  I would hope not.  It means your activities are
>focussed on Australia.  ADNA's activities are intended to
>be focussed on .AU (after a request by Pauline at an earlier
>meeting that this be the case, support by myself and many
>others, since it was initially planned to be domains operating
>within Australia.
>

The request by Pauline, myself and others was that it limits its intended
scope to issues within .AU, yes - i.e. that as a most extreme extension of
its influence, that influence will still stop at .AU (because in practical
terms, thats all it has any sort of capability to do in practical terms).
So far, so good. That's a limit on future, not current, expansion.

>A public statement that ADNA should publicly commit to only
>ever operating in COM.AU is ridiculous and shortsighted.  ADNA's
>immediate goal is to focus on the needs of commercial users of
>the name space.  This will probably mean COM.AU, although I'd
>be unsurprised if it included a recommendation to Robert Elz
>that a second or third commercial 2LD was created.

The request from ISOC-AU is NOT anything of the sort. It is that ADNA
choose to limit its INITIAL operating scope to com.au and earn its stripes
before proceeding further in terms of the scope it chooses to address. That
was all. 

Again, the crux here is that future total scope is not the same thing as
current, working scope during the formative stages of the organization. 

We (ISOC-AU's directors) are suggesting that voluntarily choosing not to
cross too many paths with black cats in the first instance would earn ADNA
a lot of future kudos as an organization (or set of concerned individuals,
or whatever you want to frame it as) than assuming that "we exist,
therefore we own (all)". There really is a difference between the two
things - ultimate future scope is not equal to initial chosen scope (for
any organization).

To take your example of ISOC-AU - yes, that's exactly the same point -
ISOC-AU doesn't claim to represent every soul concerned with the internet
in australia, but does expect to limit its ultimate scope to the physical
territory of Australia in terms of membership. 

Your statement above is, then, basically in agreement with the stance of
ISOC-AU's directors - that initial operations start at COM.AU and work
outward on a merit basis. So let's do exactly that. 

Simon

---
Simon Hackett, Technical Director, Internode Systems Pty Ltd
31 York St [PO Box 284, Rundle Mall], Adelaide, SA 5000 Australia
Email: simon§internode.com.au  Web: http://www.on.net
Phone: +61-8-8223-2999          Fax: +61-8-8223-1777