North American Network Operators Group
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RE: summarising [was: Re: ICANNs role]

  • From: michael.dillon
  • Date: Wed Apr 04 12:06:14 2007 
 
> Analogies that compare to a postulated situation which is patently
> false are amusing, but non-constructive.  You might wish to bone up on
> your understanding of US firearms law (preferably from a source other
> than CSI or Law & Order [insert standard disparaging comment about the
> mass media getting anything they cover, including the Internet, wrong
> here]) before you embarrass yourself with another faulty analogy
> involving guns.

People who take analogies as anything more than a rough approximation
are amusing. The fact is that in some jurisdictions in the USA there is
a cooling off period between the time when a person applies to buy a
handgun and the time they recieve one. Canada is somewhat similar due to
the need to file a Firearms Acquisition Certficate with the police. In
both these cases, the rules were put in place to allow enough time for
human beings to be alerted, and to intervene if necessary.

Network operations is not all about technology. There are people there
too and it is not unusual to accept the need for human beings to respond
to an alert with some time delay. That's why SLAs have 4 hour time to
repair clauses, etc. The situation with new domain name registrations is
similar. Some people wreak havoc by leveraging the fact that the
turnaround time is FASTER than human reaction time. Applying the same
general solution that some authorities have applied to handgun
purchases, is the answer. 

This has nothing whatsoever to do with handguns themselves. It has to do
with the operational techniques used by the authorities which regulate
handguns. Whether or not you agree with those authorities is irrelevant.
The fact is that those authorities have goals and they apply certain
processes to meet these goals. We can learn by studying the abstract
without worrying overly much about the details of handgun sales. Details
are only important in the field where you APPLY the knowledge learned,
and in this case that is network operations.

--Michael Dillon