| Paul Montgomery wrote:
 | 
 | >Why is NOIE trying to big-note itself by making such a hoo-hah about the
 | >GTLD controversy when we have a local domain structure, com.au, which
 | >desperately needs a kick in the backside? 

NOIE has been charged by Alston with the job of preparing the
Australian response to the Green Paper.  The forum yesterday indicated
they're probably going to make a reasonable job of it too, they brought
together many disparate interests and got good consensus on the issues.

 | >If Paul Twomey is serious
 | >about local Net ventures, how about getting ADNA to pull its finger out
 | >and introduce competition (read: local businesses making real Internet
 | >money) in [insert several commercial domains].au again instead of
 | >piddling about with pr.au.

There wasn't a lot of time to talk about it but the ADNA stalemate 
received some vigorous discussion.

Mark Hughes replied:
 
 | 3. Development of Registrar Licence Conditions under
 | which multiple Registrars would operate.  Draft document
 | is available at:
 
ADNA don't have the authority to license anyone to do anything.  They
have not demonstrated industry self-regulation, they do not have the
support of most of the current delegates, and they have deliberately
broken off discussion with ISOC-AU on reworking their M&A over 3 months
ago.  They have not explained publically why they did this, but the
outcome is that they stopped consulting with a major stakeholder in the
industry.  Consultation with the community is a pre-requisite for any
authority to be passed to them from the existing delegates.

 | For the record, at the NOIE forum yesterday when .au
 | was under discussion I did raise the issue of NOIE
 | input.  As ADNA does not currently have support from
 | everyone in the internet community, I said that NOIE
 | participation might assist in resolving some
 | outstanding issues.  The initial response from Paul
 | Twomey, although I'm sure it was not intended to be the
 | definitive ex officio response, was that existing government
 | policy was clearly in favour of self-regulation rather
 | than government control.  The expectation appears
 | to be for the internet community to resolve the issues.
 
NOIE also offered "resources" to help ADNA and the Internet community
to start to resolve the current stalemate.  Paul Twomey's comments are
certainly correct, there's no way the government would want to take
control.  But NOIE could be an excellent neutral body to assist with
reconciling and reworking the broken ADNA process.

Kate Lance