Mike O’Connor

This is a post that most readers of this blog are going to scratch their heads over.  I volunteered a fair amount of my time to ICANN (the organization that works on the domain-name and numbering systems that underpin the Internet).  Until yesterday.  I got pretty cranky over an email exchange that I (as a working-group member at the bottom of ICANN's bottom-up policy-making process) had with a couple Big Kids on the Council that manages our working-group-based policy-making process.  I loudly resigned over this -- here's a link to my grouchy email to the community.

Kieren McCarthy wrote a great article that places my resignation in context and that article kinda went viral in the community yesterday afternoon.  A bunch of people have asked me "hey Mikey, what that heck put you up in the high branches like that??"  So I've decided to post the email dialog that so got me going.  Sorry to those of you regular readers who will be scratching your head over this weird post.

Cast of characters in the tragedy;

Mikey -- that would be me

Tim Ruiz -- one of the people who represents Registrars on the GNSO Council.  Tim works for GoDaddy.com, which is by far the largest registrar (essentially the Wal-Mart of domain-name registration outfits).  With those two hats, Tim pulls considerable weight in the organization.

Stéphane Van Gelder -- another Registrar representative and also Chair of the GNSO Council.  Another heavy hitter.

The Dialog;

Mikey: hi all,

i'm just lobbing a suggestion into the "locking during UDRP"-recommendation discussion that's going on in advance of the Council meeting coming up later today.  this note is primarily aimed at my Councilors, colleagues in the BC and fellow members of the IRTP-WG, but i've copied a few others just because i can.

as a member of a working group that's wrapping up two years of work on this stuff, i am hoping that the Council will not rewrite our recommendations on its own.  this is a repeat of the "i'm trainable" comment i made in SFO.  what i'm hoping is that the Council will vote the recommendation up or down and, if it would like, sends the defeated recommendation back to the working group for refinement.  you can even include suggestions if you like.  but please don't make changes to our recommendations without giving us a chance to participate in the process.

you can invoke all the historic "Council should be *managing* the policy process, not being a legislative body" arguments in this paragraph if you like.

i'm still trainable. 

Tim Ruiz: My goal is not to derail the rest of the work over this since that rec was already acted on. The locking question has already been picked up in the UDRP issues report (done in response to the RAP report).

Mikey: yep -- i get that Tim.  i'm really zeroed in on the process, though.  it would be fine to push it back to the WG with your comment as annotation.  this issue is the perfect one to use as a test-case for the very reasons you describe.  my worry is that some day we'll get to a tough/complex issue  on a WG report and the Council will roar off and try to fix it on the fly rather than pushing it back to the people who've devoted the time to get up to speed on the nuances.

as a WG member i'd much rather hear "hey WG folks, can you fix this?" than "we fixed it for you."

Tim Ruiz: There is nothing for the WG  to fix and the Council is not changing any recs. We just want to consider that one with the UDRP issue it is already tied in with. I am all for process, but we can protect that without duplicating efforts.

Mikey: you folks get to do whatever you want to do -- but like i said, i'm trainable.  if you as the Council are going to make that call, without engaging the WG in the conversation, you're setting precedents that the Council may come to regret when it is trying to recruit volunteers to devote years of their lives to efforts like that in the future.

all you have to do is ask us, rather than telling us.

Tim Ruiz: Mikey,

My record is pretty clear on process. I defend it fiercly. But you are really blowing this out of proportion. If you are trainable, let it show. Let's discuss further F2F.

Best,
Tim

Mikey: Tim, i'd much rather have this conversation over a limited-scope test-case issue that's relatively straightforward to resolve than a really hard one.

if working groups are the place where policy gets made, then let the WG fix this minor problem for you rather than fixing it yourselves.

Tim Ruiz: I'd rather not. I've explained it to you. You either don't get it or don't want to. If you want to discuss F2F let me know.

Stéphane Van Gelder: Mikey,

I think the GNSO Council has a clear understanding of its role in the policy development process.

Thanks,

Stéphane

Mikey: yep.  and so does this volunteer WG member.  i'm now fully trained.

UPDATE:

I'm calming down (and was much appreciative of all of you who reached out to help me with that).  So I'm clambering down out of the high branches (while sitting in the Tokyo airport transit lounge on the trip home -- not exactly the best place for reflective writing).  Thanks all of you who reached out.  I'll write you direct notes tomorrow after I'm back in the midwest.

Very neat news today out of ICANN.  Whit Diffie is this monster figure in the crypto world -- he's one of the founding folks in that circle.  He worked at Sun for ages and now he's joining ICANN.

Click HERE for the ICANN press-release.

Click HERE for a starter-page at Wikipedia.

Click HERE to watch him on an episode of Cranky Geeks (with John Dvorak) to get a feel for what's he's like in person.

I'm really glad to hear that he's joining the ICANN gang.  It'll give us some depth that we badly need in this area.

Here are links to his first State of the Union speech and the Q&A portion of his remarks to the House Republicans two days later.  The real deal instead of the sound bites.  Hey, this guy's still got it for me.  Just sayin'...

State of the Union

Q&A - Republican Caucus

I just posted a story over at the St Paul Broadband Committee site about my belief that a lot of the municipal WiFi networks don't seem to be grounded in financial reality.

Here's a link to the article and here's a link to the muni-WiFi financial model I built to go with it.

Here's the deal -- let's get these models out of the hands of the VooDoo consulting expert type people and into the hands of the people. "Open source financial modeling" if you will. Let's beat on this model -- or write a new one if this one is hopeless -- and get to the point where we ALL understand the economics that underpin these projects.

That way, we can either rejoice in bridging the digital divide, solving the problems of the world and putting a chicken in every pot (as advocates claim) or we can avoid the mess that comes with yet another technology project that over-promises and under-delivers.

What say you? Let's have at it.

I've been grouchy about Qwest in the past, sometimes even way beyond grouchy into the "troublemaker" category.

But today it was reported that they are the only RBOC holdout in the NSA's program to build a database of every dang call made in the USA.

Kudos to Qwest for holding those call records back. Stick to your guns, folks.

The latest project to keep me away from this blog is bringing up the registry for CORP.COM domain names.

This is a project that Edmon Chung and I started back in 2002 when Edmon was the hotrod young entepreneur in charge of Neteka. He did such a great job that they got acquired by Afilias not long after we started our project.

What with Edmon distracted by the acquisition, and me distracted with a series of really interesting InstantCxO engagements, the Corp.com Registry sorta went on the back burner for a few years. But the time seemed right to both of us last year and the project is galloping toward an April launch.

2nd level domains like CORP.COM have been steadily gaining favor over the last few years, which is another reason why it seems like the time might be right to kick things off. Afilias is game, Edmon is game, I'm game, we have our first registrar in NamesBeyond. So off we go.

I'm off to give a speech to the assembled regional telecommunications lawyers gang this morning -- my topic is the regulatory issues in VoIP. Good thing there are folks like Jeff Pulver out there doing a great job of blogging this issue -- there's an amazing amount of stuff going on in this arena with new twists every day. Read his stuff to stay up to date.

Here's the outline of my speech.

How should we classify VoIP?

- A voice service?
- A mobile service?
- A data service?

Which way should we be consistent as regulators?

- By technology?
- By service?
- By layer?

Which things do we want to break?

- Universal Service?
- Access charges?
- Long-distance rates?
- LATAs?
- POTS?
- The Internet?
- CALEA?
- Numbering?
- Disability access?
- 911?

Whose ox do we want to gore?

- LECs and CLECs?
- LD Carriers?
- VoIP over Internet providers (eg. Vonage)?
- ISPs?

What is our goal?

- Promote new technology adoption and investment?
- Preserve existing investments/infrastructure?
- Assure quality and standardization?
- Level the playing field?
- Assure non-discrimination and access?
- Promote competition and lower prices?

Who does the regulating?

- International - ITU?
- National - FCC?
- State - PUC?
- City – Cable Commissions?
- Nobody?

Ooo, now this one's interesting... Here's a writup in The Register talking about how some clever folks have figured out how to fiddle with caller-ID strings in the VOIP world -- in both directions (inbound and outbound). Here's a link to the article.

Hardly a "harmless prank" this could have some pretty nasty implications for stalking and identity-theft reasons. Read on for a few thought-provoking quotes...

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How 'bout them apples? This could cause the financial-services crowd a fair amount of heartburn. But what about the implications for people who are tangled up with a stalker? Here's another quote:
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I'm also really interested in the regulatory impacts of VOIP, and this promises to generate a lot of pain on that front as well. Once again, here's what The Register has to say:
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Stay tuned, this will be coming up again. Fersure...

Ralph Jenson and I built us a pretty-darn-close-to-perfect copy of Vonage back a couple years ago and were within a whisker of kicking it off here in the Twin Cities. Unfortunately, Vonage came to town a year earlier than we thought they would and blew us out of the water. But I've been tracking VOIP stuff ever since.

These days the most interesting thing to me is the regulatory rasslin' that's going to be going on, so this will mostly be policy-wonk stuff. Heck, I've got to give a speech about VOIP regulatory impacts in a few weeks. That research alone should fill up several good blog entries.