Re: [ga] Letter from ICANN to New.net

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2001 at 06:48:42PM -0700, William S. Lovell wrote:
> A telling presumption exhibited here: if the "protocol community"
> doesn't like something, ICANN should dump it.

Yes.  That is the same presumption you would use to say "if heart 
surgeons think a procdure is dangerous, dump it". 

>  However, the
> Internet does not exist for the benefit of the "protocol community"
> or ICANN; those two entities exist for the benefit of Internet
> users.

Right.  Medicine doesn't exist for the benefit of doctors.  But if 
doctors tell us something is a bad idea, we generally listen.  If we 
got practically universal agreement among doctors that a procedure was a 
bad idea, we should almost certainly dump it.

The problem is protocol engineering really is a species of "rocket
science"* -- it takes a long time to really understand the issues.  And, 
despitewhat you hear, most of the participants on these lists really 
aren't rocket scientists of the proper variety.

(*) for those who may not be familiar with the idiom, "rocket science" 
is a slang phrase meaning "truly esoteric and specialized technical 
speciality". 

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain
--
This message was passed to you via the ga@dnso.org list.
Send mail to majordomo@dnso.org to unsubscribe
("unsubscribe ga" in the body of the message).
Archives at http://www.dnso.org/archives.html