North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Verisign's public opinion play

  • From: Howard C. Berkowitz
  • Date: Tue Oct 07 09:13:19 2003 
At 10:27 AM +0100 10/7/03, [email protected] wrote:

 >I think this list may be a very good choice of where to construct

such a response.

Are you being paid by Verisign?
A disclaimer seems appropriate -- right now, I'm being only occasionally paid for consulting by clients not having anything to do with Verisign.

A "constructed" response is the worst thing we could
do. Everyone should write their own responses in their
own words based on their own experiences or their own
skills and knowledge. That's the only way to demonstrate
that Verisign was wrong, wrong, wrong.

A "constructed" response is pure politics and only
demonstrates that a certain opinion is shared by
a bunch of people with no basis in fact. We don't
need to trumpet our opinions; we need to document and
publish the facts of the matter.

And this list is definitely not the place to
discuss writing a letter of protest. If political
activity is your bag, then try http://www.meetup.com
Writing a "constructed" response, I would agree, should either come through an already existing group (e.g., IETF/IAB), or from an ad hoc organization, which, in this context, MUST have a truly open process.

That being said, writing something, even as an individual, which strikes the interest of news media is not necessarily a skill everyone here has. I do have some background in this, and would be happy to work with a team, and with individuals to the extent my time permits. It's important to get this out of a perspective of "regulator versus poor persecuted Verisign". versus technically perfect analyses, a product of an open process, that are incomprehensible or at least uninteresting to a nonspecialist reporter, Congressional staffer, etc.

When you start to write anything, may I suggest one of the things you have to keep at the front of your mind is that many of your audience, outside the engineering community, equate the Web and the Internet. This isn't stupidity, it's lack of knowledge. They have to realize that an ISP can be the point of access to non-public yet critical services, such as being the entry point for VPNs for anything from credit authorization to secure medical reporting.

I hope to get to at least part of the ICANN meeting -- unfortunately, I had an uncomfortable night -- both a cat circus on the bed and using some unfamiliar muscles yesterday and resulting in a painful back -- so I'm now running on 3-4 hours of sleep. Ah, for the days when the Internet was young and I could get by with that much sleep...;-)