RE: [wg-b] Re: [wg-c] telephone numbers in domain names.

[Harald Alvestrand <Harald@alvestrand.no>]

At 13:25 22/11/2000 -0500, Judith Oppenheimer wrote:
>There are obvious benefits of keeping ENUM out of ICANN's clutches, but
>
>(a) the IETF ENUM working group's leadership contains people from Verisign
>and NeuStar and others no doubt too, who are or will be competing with
>Pulver/NetNumber for commercial supremacy in the ENUM marketplace:  note
>ENUM's rush to strike a deal with the ITU, literally just weeks ago,
>questioned by some ENUM followers,

The details of this issue can be inspected in 
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-itu-sg2-liason-enum-00.txt
The enum working group chair is Richard Shockley, who has a Netcom address.
The published RFC 2916 was written by Patrik Fältström of Cisco.
I'm not sure what you mean by "leadership"....

>and (b), that rosy ITU path is not without thorns ... for example,
>"1.e164.arpa" represents an area that's actually shared between several
>North American countries; even within the US, the delegation to the ITU is
>managed by the State Department while the regulation of telephony is
>managed by the FCC.

actually I believe the "1" number space is managed by NeuStar, and that 
NeuStar was created (many years ago) expressly for the purpose of managing 
this number space.

>(At the area code level its no better.  Who has authority over
>"2.1.2.1.e164.arpa"? Is this the New York State public utilities
>commission, Verizon, or a third party?

probably you would have to ask NeuStar which telephone company 
[0..9].2.1.2.e164.arpa is assigned to; I believe numbers are handed out to 
companies in blocks of 10.000 or so.

>   Still further, a potential use of
>ENUM is to bypass the local carrier, for example to send documents as
>e-mail instead of faxes; this means, potentially, a loss of revenues.  So
>while the users of phone numbers have an interest in listing their numbers,
>the phone companies are conflicted.)

the easiest way to do this is of course to publish your email address 
instead of your fax number; enum is intended for the case where you for 
some reason have a number, and no email address.

I believe the common case here is where you wish to reach the net/phone 
gateway that provides service to this number; I have no idea how the 
business models of such gateways will work out, but one possibility is that 
the subscriber gets the ability to be reached from an IP phone as part of 
his normal telephone subscription. In that case, the management hierarchy 
proposed by the ITU makes sense.

>Bottom line:  the IAB/IETF/ITU alliance against Pulver/NetNumber's .TEL is
>business, not altruism.

I have nothing against pulver's business model; all I've said about that is 
that they don't need the .tel domain to pursue it.
It sure made a lot more sense than the other proposals for .tel!

--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, alvestrand@cisco.com
+47 41 44 29 94
Personal email: Harald@Alvestrand.no