North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Tomatoes for Verisign at NANOG 29

  • From: Howard C. Berkowitz
  • Date: Thu Oct 16 16:58:47 2003 
At 12:45 PM -0700 10/16/03, JC Dill wrote:

At 11:56 AM 10/16/2003, Chris Strandt wrote:
Maybe a "vote" at the end of the presentation would be better.

After Verisign has to say what they want, it would be interesting to see what the participants think of starting Site Finder again.

Its not as press worthy... but it lets Verisign have their say, and gives the community a voice right there on the spot on the issue.
Have a vote with the tomatoes. All those who oppose the wildcards would put their tomatoes or tomato-substitutes in one pile, all those who approve of the wildcards would put their token-of-choice in another pile.
I'm not sure I really want to think about the alternate-token-of-choice. Let me stipulate that I was born and brought up in Northern New Jersey, started as a chemist exposed to the usual organic chemistry aromas, and STILL consider some things as smelling bad. :-)


We need a *visual* way to make the point to Verisign, to ICANN, to the press, to the Internet using public who do not understand the underlying technical issue. The press is not going to put this story on the wire and carry it on the front page of newspapers around the world if the story is "NANOG meeting attendees voted 417 to 3 to indicate disapproval of Verisign's wildcard scheme in the .com and .net root server". A photo montage showing people buying tomatoes, holding tomatoes, placing tomatoes in a pile, a room full of people wearing red shirts, etc. THAT is what the press needs to get the message out to the people to shame ICANN into doing the right thing. Look at this as a photo-op for NANOG participants to collectively make their point known in a visually graphic way.

From experience back in my more general political days, either have a see-through bag or basket for the tomatoes. While a nice pyramid would be nice, without very careful handling, we will have tomatoes bouncing in all directions.