VoIP and ENUM

If you want to get more information on how roaming works and about the tariffs charged by your operator in the different countries, the European Commission has set-up a web-page (since October 2005):

Roaming: using my mobile abroad: are prices dropping?

According to Viviane Reding: No, they are not.

Prices for 4 minutes: 3-6 Euro to call home, and 2-4 Euro to be called from home (for YOU).

20-30 Eurocents per SMS is also nice (for the operators) - No, you are not allowed to park afterwards on the spot reserved for handicapped persons - this is only for physically handicapped - not for mentally handicapped. If you bring this forward as an argument, you may loose your drivers licence.

What I am missing is data tariffs when roaming: from my own experience I know that they are around 10 Euro per MB. So this is more then 100 times the price I pay in my mobile home network.

So if for example you get the crazy idea to watch a video on your mobile phone abroad, you are better off just entering the next shop, buy yourself a TV-set, a VCR and the movie. Some people also stupid enough (most only once in their lifetime) to take some pictures on the beach with their mobile phone and send them home via MMS, only to find out that they are busted if they receive the bill next month.

What I also consider a very typical example for the customer service of mobile operators is one of the footnotes to the tables as reason if no prices are given:

Roaming rates were not publicly available on the operator's website at the time of data collection

Ha, trust me, they are available, but very well hidden - I know from experience.

What are the lessons learned? - You can earn a lot of money simply with the laziness and ease of humans.

After a day or two in shock the European mobile operators seem to recover. Of course Vodafone's Sarin objects, but a bit lame, according to Forbes.com:

Vodafone, which operates in 17 EU and non-EU countries, said the EU proposal to scrap the fee to receive a call did not recognize that companies must pay connection costs.

Interestingly T-Mobile says that in theory, it is in favor of lower call charges, but believes competition will bring prices down.

Really? When?

Viviane Reding is still on her task:

She explained that mobile phone users on the continent are slammed with high phone bills simply for crossing a border inside the union. "Today it is only when using your mobile phone abroad you realize that there are still borders in Europe."

It's a lucrative business too: One U.K. newspaper estimated that mobile phone firms make up to 15% of their income from roaming charges.

Reding said the companies generate "pure profit" by charging travelers for receiving a call when they are away, and had paid no heed to warnings they should trim costs.

"Mobile operators seem to have some difficulty understanding my message."

Hear, hear.

# posted by Richard : 21:30

Impact.lab has an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, naming him the father of the Internet. I always had the opinion that this is Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. Anyway, Tim is also conceding some mistakes, he would have skipped the double slash and put the domain names in reverse order

Huh?

This was Tim? Interesting, I would have blamed Paul Mockapetris.

Anyway, Google fixed all these problems.

And if you really want to know who was the God of Internet, and get some interesting background info, read Reporting to God (via ITU-T blog).

Wow, I got mentioned in one line with Henning Schulzrinne and Brough Turner by Steve. That's an honor ;-)

How? Ok, it is about IMS. Steve is pointing to my Rome presentation (so it is obvoius what I think about IMS - he may also have pointed to my VON presentation).

He is also asking Henning and Brough what they think about IMS. Ok, I could have told Steve beforehand: Never ask Henning a simple question, you always get a complicated answer. You have to ask Henning complicated questions to get a simple answer.

I like the answer from Brough:

Me: Brough, I’ve got a question for you?
Brough: What is it?
Me: IMS ?!?!?!
Brough: [laughs]
Brough: I look at it like this. We had the IN [Intelligent Network] for 20 years, and it created 3 services [CallerID, CallWaiting, CallForwarding]. It will take 10 years to build the NGN [IMS] network, and maybe a few services will come out of that too. And in the meantime, the carriers and TEMS are going to need to buy a ton of hardware and software, and NMS is in the business of selling those things.

Ok, to be honest, there is also NP and 800, but basically Brough is at the point. So much about the famous IMS services.

And if you believe it or not, they even trying to sell the carriers boxes to link to the existing IN systems (IM-SSF).

Two weeks ago I posted about Cisco finally adopting SIP and that Microsoft is joining forces with CISCO

to integrate its Office Communicator 2005 and Office Live Communications with Cisco's Unified Communications System.

Who needs MS and Cisco? As Klaus Darilion from enum.at is pointing out: SIP Outlook Integation is already there. SIP TAPI

So they are definitely latecomers ;-)

See Jeffs post on:

As Congress now embarks on major efforts to rewrite the laws governing the future of communications and the Internet, I ask you all to consider joining the VON Coalition at this critical moment. This is the year that the policy debate will rage and shape how we communicate and what we might do to evolve the Internet.

I can only support this statement.

ZDNet UK is announcing this today as breaking story. James Enck is fuming about this in "On my Bristols", correctly, because as every decent blogger in the scene knows, Andy posted about this already two days ago on Sunday.

I also "hate it when mainstream news organisations rip off content from bloggers without any attempt at attribution".

UPDATE: Forbes.com is a bit late, but at least referencing Andy

The commercial ENUM deployment in Austria started already in December 2004 with opening nearly all number ranges (geographic, mobile, corporate, non-geographic VoIP (720) and 800), with the exception premium rate numbers. In April 2005 the special ENUM-based number range 780 went into service. For more information see here. This number-range is directly linked to the corresponding ENUM entries and can be reached from the PSTN via any ENUM-enabled gateway (e.g. the one from Telekom Austria)

After an (to be expected) slow up-take now already 12 registrars are giving out numbers, see the enum.at wepage.

This week yesss, the discount daughter company of one (an Austrian mobile operator), already selling a pre-paid virtual mobile service, started offering a VoIP webfone service, based on ENUM, 780 numbers and SIP. And, as I always said, you cannot sell ENUM to an end-user, without even mentioning ENUM - you also do not explain how TCAP, INAP, SS7 and Query-on-Release works to somebody porting his number.

Nevertheless, the service is a VoIP service on the public Internet, you get an ENUM entry in e164.arpa, a SIP URI and you can be reached by anybody else querying ENUM or using the SIP URI. Of course yesss is also querying ENUM and delivering the call via VoIP and SIP if an entry is found for free.

As UA either a Soft-client may be downloaded via yesss, but you may use any other SIP SW or HW phone of your choice.

The only drawback of the 780 number range is that still some (other mobile) operators charge a fortune to terminate on this number range, others already charge normal local or national rates. It was basically a lapse from the regulator not to define a cap on the tariffs to these numbers, as some others do (e.g. Ireland) or are planning to do. And the Skype idiots are still not delivering calls to 780 (and also not to 720).

Considering that some other companies in Austria (e.g. Silver Server) are providing VoIP services on fixed lines together with xDSL access by porting geo-graphic numbers to VoIP, put them in ENUM and also query ENUM outbound, I really ask myself, why do we need IMS and walled gardens, QoS, managed networks, SPEERMINT, etc. It is working fine already. The Internet, ENUM and SIP is sufficient.

USA Today has an artcicle today: Piecing together the perfect airport - 10 amenities every terminal should have. I consider this list interesting, because I agree and disagree:

Here the proposed amenties, in order:

1.Live Music
2.Rocking chairs
3.Wine bars
4.Art galleries
5.Napping pods
6.Free wireless Internet
7.Laptop chargers
8.Day spas
9.Booties
10.Convenience stores

Since I basically consider an airport as a place I want to leave as soon as possible and if I have to wait I want to have it as quiet and relaxing as possible, I do not need live music. Rocking chairs, napping pods, wine bars, art gallieries and day spas are nice to have, but I consider them not important. Instead of booties I would it consider better not to be required to put my shoes off at security, and have instead a baggie to put the metal items in (as some do).

I agree with free wireless Internet, of course and also power outlets. It is really funny to see women in business dress sit on the floor beside the men's toilet because there is the only power outlet of the terminal.

Convenience stores are very useful (Vienna Airport has one, although somewhat hidden under the arival hall and now moved somewhere else because the termial is rebuilt).

But what I consider top priority for an airport is no delays, no lost luggage and short (or fast) access to the gates, especially if you change planes. Especially large and new built airports have walking times up to and over 20 minutus from the central lounge to the gates. I have no problem walking this distances, particularly after a long flight, but if you have to change planes and a stopover of one hour, 40 minutes simple walking time is a problem, especially if you have a delay.

Here I come to another issue I have with changing planes: arrival time (and the stopover time calculated from this) is given by touch-down time. At least all pilot of all airlines brag about being on-time if they touchdown at arrival time. Given that they then taxi around on some airports for 10 to 20 minutes, then have eventually to wait for a gate, then another 10 minutes until the doors open and if you are at the end of the plane, you have to wait 10-15 minutes until your fellow passengers get their act together (depending on nationality), you may end up with 30 to 40 minutes until you are at your arrival gate after touch-down. Add now 30 minutes time finding your way on a foreign airport and walk, you will have a problem.

I therefore request airlines in future to define arrival time = my arrival time at the gate.

BTW, with railways the arrival time say in Vienna is also the stop at the main station and not crossing the city borders (although this is only 10 minutes and would improve timeliness of the Austrian Railway substantially)

Monday was basically not a good day at the IETF. After the morning session featuring the somewhat problematic ENUM WG (these problems have been solved in the meantime), in the afternoon the next WG session with serious problems took place. This was the first official SPEERMINT session after chartering the WG in quite a long BoF process, and as it seems, there are still many issues what these WG is about to do.

The discussion is still circling around the terms IP network, VoIP peering and Interconnect and proponents from all sides try to misunderstand each other. There are on one side the end-to-end (P2P?) Internet advocates raising the (valid) question what the whole WG is for and on the other extreme end the NGN, 3GPP and IMS walled garden advocates (bell-heads) trying to take over the IETF and make it a better ITU-T(?).

A typical proponent is my friend Sohel Khan with his presentation IP Service Peering Architecture, not even mentioning the Internet.

When I mentioned the ITU-T above, this was on purpose. At ITU-T in Geneva yesterday and today a workshop took place: What Rules for IP-NGN enabled NGNs?

Looking at some of the presentations I finally got the impression that I am in the wrong place, because some of the speakers there are taking the end-to-end principle and the separation of transport and services more seriously into account then some participants here.

I want to draw your attention especially to the presentations from Ernst Langmantel (RTR), John Horrocks (CEPT ECC TRIS/DTI), Wolfgang Reichl (OeFEG/ETP), but also Robert Frieden (Pennsylvania State University) on Net Neutrality, Patrick Xavier (Australia) on USO and of course the excellent presentation and the background paper from Scott Marcus on Interconnection in an IP-enabled NGN Environment(!). This does not imply that the others are not interesting, but I was not able to look at all of them (yet).

So I raised some questions on the SPEERMINT mailing list:

I have some questions for clarification regarding the SPEERMINT charter (or in ITU-T speak: Mr Chairman, I am confused)

"SPEERMINT focuses (on) architectures to identify, signal, and route delay-sensitive (real-time) communication sessions. These sessions use the SIP signaling protocol to enable peering between two or more administrative domains over IP networks. Where these domains peer,or meet, the establishment of trust, security, and a resistance to abuse and attack are all important considerations."

First question: the term IP networks seems to need clarification:

IP networks is a generic term valid for both the Internet and private (walled garden) IP networks, but

I had always the opinion that this is the INTERNET Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the PRIMARY goal is to define architectures to identify, signal and route ... sessions on the public INTERNET.

This does not prevent anybody to use these architectures and related protocols also on private IP networks, as it is done with other protocols and architectures (e.g. the DNS).

But is is NOT the task of the IETF to define such architectures and protocols PRIMARILY for the use in private IP networks.

So I understand that the primary goal of SPEERMINT is to enable peering between two or more administrative domains on the INTERNET and also to establich trust, security and resistance to abuse and attacks on the Internet.

I consider it therefore curious that some say the I-Ds draft-lendl-domain-policy-ddds-00 and draft-lendl-speermint-federation-00 are out of scope (presentation). If these drafts are out-of-scope then maybe somebody would be so nice to explain to me what is in scope of SPEERMINT.

I am also confused about the statement from Rohan Mahy that nobody will use this because no provider will make it public to which federation he belongs to.

Since this I-Ds are modelled along the quite sucessful model of BGP peering, I wonder.

Michael Haberler added to this more details:

I'd be very interested what people believe to be a viable alternative to runtime policy discovery - in particular visavis the fact that the draft-lendl-domain-policy-ddds-00 proposes to pubish a unique ID for a policy to enable runtime matching, but NOT requiring to publish what that policy ID actually stands for.

In BGP speak this amounts to: "Here is my AS number. You might find that AS number tacked to other domains if you scan a lot of them, but no, we are not publishing our peering and transit relations in an RIR database". As for the BT example, saying that the sip.bt.com ingress point supports the BT IP interconnect policy, which is likely to be found on a BT website as their Reference Interconnect Offer in the first place. So much for the danger of "private parts exposure".

I have a hard time believing we are back to static local configuration as the "preferred" solution, be that bilateral setup or "everything goes to my peering shop".

Here's a paper exercise for you to tinker with alternatives:

With SIP capabilites as they stand today, please emulate the GSM association - that's 600+ operators with some 23.000 interconnect agreements.

In the first attempt, try to avoid the "big SIP hub" scenario for extra intellectual challenge.

After done with defining pathetic access lists and local routing tables, I assume you're motivated to think about alternatives. Then again, if one has gobs of staff managing interconnect relations, that staff could well eventually be retrained to edit access control lists and tables.

From a commercial point of view, there likely is a business case for the SIP hubs/peering providers. I think they have real value asSIP/RTP cleansing shops. I'm not sure that approach should be the IETF entropy solution to fabric discovery.

And, while lashing out at the unsuitability of draft-lendl-domain-policy-ddds-00 for current service provider mindsets, keep in mind it does not limit itself to "carriers" - it does address groups of users, and in fact the user-service provider interface policy discovery problems just as well.

Bonus value: it also includes "go to my peering shop" - besides keeping the end-to-end option open.

It is true that SPEERMINT is special (optional?) within the IETF, because to peer between SIP proxies on the Internet all you need is SIP AoRs and RFC 3263 NAPTR and SRV, and I also understand that the major problem of the VSP starts with the SIP URI giving away their identity (some peering fabrics make a living on this ;-)

Nobody seems to have a problem with this with e-mail.

Voice is really a special application, seemigly infecting anybody with bell-headism.

USA Today has a short clip in Moneyline that Lucent Technologies and French equipment maker Alcatel SA are discussing a merger in what could start consolidation among the firms. The companies in a statement: "We can confrim that Lucent and Alcatel are engaged in dicussions about potential merger of equals that is intended to be priced at market. There can be no assurances that any agreement will be reached or that a transaction will be consummated."

Is this another mega-merger between different company cultures that will not work out finally?

An act of dispair?

Next on stage Siemens and Nortel?

Carrier/Infrastructure ENUM Points of Agreement - 22 March 2006

1. There will be a long-term solution that does things "right" as well as an interim solution that can be used by individual countries to implement an interoperable carrier ENUM tree ASAP

2. In order to project a unified approach to the "right" long-term solution with other standards bodies and NRAs, there will be explicit statements in the affected I-Ds that make it clear that the interim solution will be deprecated upon achievement of the long-term solution.

3. There will be a new I-D documenting the carrier enum apex. This will be done in such a way that the location of the infrastructure designator shall not vary by country code; it will be the same for the entire domain and in every country code. The apex "e164i.arpa" was suggested, but that is tentative only. Everyone felt .arpa was certainly the correct TLD. This process will begin asap.

4. There will be an interim solution that will move ahead as an ENUM working group item ASAP, following the BLR logic and wording of the Michael Haberler's current I-D on this subject. However, some of the content which relates to DNS RRs in that draft will be split out into a different, new draft.

5. This interim solution will state prominently in the I-D, that this is in fact an interim solution that will be deprecated upon approval (loosely timed) of the "right" long-term solution. This will be at or near the beginning of such an I-D in a special section so that it can easily be located and will be noticed by readers.

6. This interim solution will not use a TXT RR, but a new RR type that will be moved ahead in the ENUM WG, with review and consultation from the appropriate DNS WG.

7. In summary, three I-Ds, all in the ENUM WG: document the long-term solution in a carrier-enum I-D in the ENUM WG with specifics around the new apex and solution, interim solution I-D in ENUM WG, other BLR/RR-related I-D in the ENUM WG.

8. Timing on new apex carrier enum I-D: create -00 asap as a WG item. Jason Livingood volunteers as document editor along with Penn Pfautz and Richard Stastny as co-authors. It should be noted that this I-D does not necessarily describe carrier enum requirements per se; it describes how to implement it in a specific domain apex.

9. Penn Pfautz's requirements I-D, already in process, should continue as-is and move to WGLC soon.

10. Timing on interim-solution I-D: add changes in updated haberler-03 I-D, then adopt as WG item and restart as -00. Move to WGLC at or before IETF 67.

11. Timing on BLR/RR-related I-D and new apex I-D: create new I-D asap. Move to WGLC at or before IETF 67.

12. All parties to this agreement will support this in good faith, in its entirety.

Signed and Agreed,



Signed by: Richard Shockey, Alexander Mayrhofer, Jason Livingood, Penn Pfautz, Lawrence Conroy, Michael Haberler, Richard Stastny

Special thanks to Jason Livingood for putting together this agreement.

The IETF ENUM WG was the first session on Monday morning, and it went quite well (business-as-usual) until it flew apart in the last 10 minutes.

The agenda is available here and the presentations given may be downloaded via this page.

Co-chair Patrik Faltstrom is back again and announced that he will start work on I-D RFC3761bis. There have been some issues especially with non-terminals NAPTRs and the DDDS. Patrik will also set up a ticketing system for tracking issues with RFC3761.

Next on the agenda the ENUM Implementors Draft was discussed and is considered to be final. The Guide and Template for IANA Registration of Enumservices is moving forward.

Next some new Enumservices where discussed, such as CNAM, IAX, FOAF, IM and calendar services. There are still many issues. Basically with every new Enumservice proposed always somebody raises the privacy issue and then somebody else is approaching the microphone challenging the use of E.164 numbers: "Why do we need phone numbers and not SIP URIs?"

Answer:
1. This is ENUM WG, NUM standing for number and E somehow relates to E.164
2. because no provider is giving SIP URIs to his customers.

IMHO it should be much easier to register Enumservices. If somebody or a group of implementers (say the foaf community) want to have their own Enumservice, why shouldn't they have it. I suggest a fast lane with only expert review similar to the planned easy registration of DNS RR as proposed in RFC2929bis. If this is possible for DNS RR, it must e possible also for Enumservices.

The proposal by Alexander Mayhofer to merge ENUM Registration (Validation) and Domainkeys as lightweight Distributed Identity Infrastructure raised many issues and controversy.

Having set all this aside, the ENUM WG finally moved on to Infrastrucure ENUM issues. The Infrastructure ENUM Requirements are finally done and will be up-issued for WGLC with two minor corrections after the blackout period.

So only Michael Haberler's and mine draft on Combined User and Carrier ENUM in the e164.arpa tree was left. I gave a short presentation and then the meeting flew apart.

It was basically our mistake that we mixed up again too many issues in one draft. I should have known better with my experience from the msg I-D (now finally RFC 4355) that the IETF is capable only to deal with one issue at a time. And you should not have options in an I-D and we had too many:

Option 1 to have a new tree beside e164.arpa via IESG, RIPE and ITU-T, Option 2 to have a split below the country code in e164.arpa or even in another tree, and finally the pursuing Option 1 and Option 2 in parallel, using Option 2 as interim solution until Option 1 is sorted out.

Option 2 had in addition a sub-option to use a "Branch Location Record" (BLR) giving the position, label and apex of the split in e164.arpa, which could optionally either be implemented as DNS TXT RR or as a new DNS RR.

So a confusing discussion started in the last 10 minutes of the meeting, jumping between policy issues with the ITU-T and why TXT records are bad.

We requested finally a hum if we should move forward with the I-D as WG item and here finally Richard Shockey (opposing the BLR and interim solution) wanted to over-hum the room.

This ended the meeting, Patrik Faltstrom ording the opponents that they MUST come to a common agreement regarding the way forward during this week at the IETF.

So I held off this post on the ENUM WG until this agreement was reached. The common agreement was reached Wednesday evening and I will post it soon in detail.

The agreement reached is basically that Option 1 and 2 are pursued in parallel, having each Option in a separate I-D. The BLR will also be in a separe I-D, featuring a BLR RR as equested by the DNS proponents, using the expert review fast lane as mentioned above.

The agreement sets out also a time frame that all I-Ds should be ready for WGLC before or at IETF67.

Yesterday AFNIC released the following statement:

The AFNIC opens up the .fr domain name to individuals from 20 June 2006

2005 the number of Internet users in France increased from 23.7 million to 26.1 million, which represents 50.5% of the French population over 11 years of age. It is used not only professionally and for online shopping; personal use, an integral part of French daily life, is also increasing. Uses include research, sharing photos, blogs, chat, etc. Individuals are showing a growing desire to stamp THEIR mark on the Internet world.

The AFNIC is reacting to this expectation by allowing all adults with a postal address in France to register domain names ending in .fr. Until now, only professionals, associations or public bodies have been able to register.

From 20 June 2006, everyone can give free rein to their imagination and register the .fr domain name which suits them.

The AFNIC is pleased to be able to participate in and boost Internet use in France in this way and to position .fr as an area for expression and freedom.

Bla, bla ... It took AFNIC quite some time to get the message that also individuals want to have their domain and that they are missing a lot of business. Even the Austrian Registry NIC.AT has more domain names delegated then AFNIC, not to mention DENIC.

The Irish Commision for Communication Regulation (ComReg) announced today officially that an Irish-Austrian Consortium wins competition for the provision of ENUM services in Ireland.

see also the document:

The Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) has today
announced that the IENUM consortium has won the competition to provide Ireland
with a single Registry for the supply of ENUM services.

The IENUM consortium is comprised of Ireland’s internet domain registry
body (IEDR) and the Internet Foundation of Austria. IENUM will now be
charged with providing a full commercial offering of ENUM services in the coming
months.

In addition to awarding IENUM the right to operate the ENUM Tier 1
Registry for Ireland, ComReg has set up an industry ENUM Policy Advisory Board
to ensure that ENUM moves from trial phase to full commercial launch.

ComReg looks forward to working closely with IENUM as it commences work
on the new Irish commercial ENUM infrastructure. ComReg believes this
service will prove highly beneficial in encouraging Irish consumers to adopt new
and converged services (such as VoIP, next generation networks (NGNs) and
Fixed-Mobile convergence) as these emerge and grow over the coming period.
....

The evolution of ENUM in Ireland was initiated by ComReg, with support
from the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources.

Many countries are carrying out ENUM trials but Ireland is now only the
third EU country, after Austria and Germany, to move fully into commercial
operation. The UK will follow suit later this year and North America (i.e.
country code “1”) in 2007 following the latter’s 12-month ENUM trial which has
recently started .

My remark on UK and US: Seeing is Believing. But maybe IENUM cound provide some help also there ;-)

The new IENUM consortium consists of IEDR of Ireland and IPA of
Austria.

IEDR is the “.ie” Domain Name Registry, which provides the service
underlying all Irish .ie domain names.
IPA is very experienced organisation in the operation of ENUM and it
provides the Austrian “.at” domain name service, as well as the world’s first
commercial ENUM service.

No, this is not (yet) the report on today's IETF ENUM and SPEERMINT sessions.

Since some people here in Dallas did not believe what I posted about the VON panel: Is IMS Really Walled Garden? - that Torben Warming from Ericsson stated that also the Internet is a garden, here the slide:

So the left upper bubble shows the Internet Garden. It would be nice if one could populate this garden with some Internet garden gnomes. Plenty of them hanging around here in Dallas ;-)

Remark: I will report about today's ENUM and SPEERMINT sessions after I have recovered and slept over it.

Being on the road, frozen and flooded in the last days, I nearly missed that CIRA (Canadian Internet Registration Authority) pulled the plug on ICANN in an open letter to ICANN last Friday.

CIRA will as of this date (March 17th, 2006):

• Suspend its voluntary contribution of funds to ICANN;
• Hold in trust CIRA's voluntary contributions to ICANN;
• Suspend consideration of any Accountability Framework;
• Decline to host or be a major sponsor of any ICANN event; and
• Cease chairing the ccNSO's IANA Working Group.

The normally very polite and British Canadians are using quite harsh words here (the full text):

CIRA is a respected and influential player in global Internet governance. This has been especially true when it comes to ICANN, where CIRA's involvement has included: participating actively in events leading to the creation of ICANN; helping create the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO); chairing the ccNSO working group on IANA; voluntarily contributing funds to ICANN; hosting the ICANN Montreal meeting; supporting the ICANN Vancouver meeting in many ways including being its main sponsor; and generally promoting the value and benefits of ICANN to the world community.

CIRA remains committed to global Internet governance. Notwithstanding this commitment, CIRA, including its Board of Directors, has grown increasingly concerned with ICANN's departure from a number of its core values. The process by which ICANN renewed its dot-com agreement with VeriSign is illustrative of this departure.

It is in this context that CIRA, wishing to see ICANN succeed, and expecting ICANN to follow accountable, transparent and fair processes, makes the following recommendations to the ICANN Board:

1. Accountability

ICANN's accountability to its stakeholders, including to the global Internet community is critical because ICANN's legitimacy is premised on stakeholder trust. When ICANN is seen to be unaccountable it loses stakeholder trust and therefore its legitimacy.

ICANN must change its structures, formally and publicly (including its by-laws), to ensure that ICANN and its Board are accountable to stakeholders, and that Board decisions are subject to formal checks and balances. A veto of Board decisions by a super-majority of Supporting Organisations would be an acceptable change.

2. Transparency

Many important Board discussions are held and many decisions are made behind closed doors. There is little or no formal record kept of these meetings beyond publishing the agenda and reporting the decisions made.

We accept that the ICANN Board should be able to hold non-public meetings if necessary and should be able to meet in camera to discuss specific issues. However, the basis for any such action must be justified and that justification reported publicly.

More importantly when reporting significant matters, in minutes or otherwise, ICANN must provide sufficient information on the deliberations leading to a particular decision. This includes summarizing the discussions, the questions asked, the answers provided and the rationale for following a particular course of action. These reports must be publicly available in a timely manner.

3. Fair Processes

In order to build and maintain trust and legitimacy, ICANN must establish and follow publicly documented and formally approved processes. These processes must be created in consultation with its stakeholders, in an accountable and transparent manner. It is important that ICANN adhere to, and be seen to adhere to, these processes at all times.

While the ICANN Board considers these concerns, and until they are remedied, CIRA will as of this date:

• Suspend its voluntary contribution of funds to ICANN;
• Hold in trust CIRA's voluntary contributions to ICANN;
• Suspend consideration of any Accountability Framework;
• Decline to host or be a major sponsor of any ICANN event; and
• Cease chairing the ccNSO's IANA Working Group.

We remain optimistic that ICANN can live up to the multi-stakeholder, bottom-up, principles on which it was established. We welcome ICANN's efforts to reform and will make ourselves available to assist ICANN in this regard.

Yours very truly,

Canadian Internet Registration Authority

This is how I had expected it

Ed, Jason, Alexander, Bernie and Michael

adding Lawrence and Richard

after the ENUM Session: Richard Shockey single handed against the rest of the world.

Seen in Richardson.

Some of us spent the afternoon in a toy shop for adults (Fry's) and headed back about 5pm to join the IETF Welcome Reception. It was again raining cats and dogs. When we appoached the Anatole from North on the 35E, we recognized already here that there will be some trouble:


And so it was:




So we decided not to take the direct exit, but the next one to reach to the Anatole via the main entrance:







This was not a good idea:


So we finally ended up at some doable exit at a nice Texan Steakhouse, definitely a better choice then the IETF Welcome Reception;-). So you never know.

The Land of the Free.

After a very cold and snow-rich winter in Austria (since the beginning of January the temperatures where mostly below 0°C, sometimes even -20°C in Vienna at night). I was really looking forward to go to sunny California and then to warm, dry and sunny Texas.

Nada, in San Jose it was raining the whole week, quite cold (just above 0°C) and snow on the surrounding hills.

Yesterday I arrived in Dallas, TX and of course it was raining cats and dogs, stormy and cold weather (about 10°C). Everybody explained to me that this was long expected and necessary, but I would not have minded this to be one week earlier or later. The IETF could have stayed in Minneapolis as well. Or do they get sponsered by the state of TX to bring the rain and cold down from Minneapolis? I did not have so much troubles with the cold weather there, as long as you can make it over to the Brits Pub.

Some people explained also to me that this bad weather is caused by Global Warming. If so, I want to have back the warm and sunny days from the Ice Age.

The Spring VON 2006 ended for me with the Blogger Speak Out, although in a bit different combination as advertised: moderator Andy, panelists Christine, David, Paul Kapustka and myself, Jeff Pulver was first row in the audience.

Andy wanted to be the session similar to blog posting, so everybody is making a post and gets comments, both from the other bloggers and from the audience.

The first round was a personal presentation of the panelists and also statement why the are blogging and why they are reading blogs. Because all for panelist had a different professional background, this was quite interesting.

The second round started as discussion on the favorite topics, but it ended with a kind of VON wrap-up and future directions of the VON.

I heard from many sides that a lot of people where somewhat disappointed by the exhibition, because there was more business-as-usual then groundbreaking new topics. One could interpret this also in a positive way that VoIP and related topics are now entering mainstream - therefor business-as-usual.

Since I am more in the sessions then in the exhibition floor: my impression here also was mixed. on one side I saw again excellent presentations, besically from the usual suspects, on the other hand there where als some sessions I definitely had problems with, as already posted. This is not against the composition of the topics by the Pulver people, on the contrary, it shows that everybody is allowed to present his position. This is also one of the benefits of the broad spectrum here that one gets more then one opinion.

And there are also some new topics emerging: Video, IPTV and TV over Internet and the related business models, community driven applications and also identity issues.

A was a bit disappointed with the policy and regulatory discussion in the US going in circles or even backwards. Jim Kohlenberger from the VON Coalition gave an excellent overview about the on-going battle in Washington and also with state legislation.

Of course the best presentation was as already stated the one from Lawrence Lessig on Tuesday morning. Jeff is giving a press and blog coverage here and I am also looking forward for the release of the recorded session.

The second hightlight for me was the SIP P2P session on Wednesday evening.

To summarize: a excellent opportunity to get a status-update and to do networking. I personally are really looking forward to the Spring VON Europe 2006 in Stockholm in May.

Please come to the Breakout Session Blogger Speak Out at 1:30pm PST today in room A1.

Andy Abramson is moderating on interesting panel featuring:

• David Beckemeyer
• Christine Herron
• Om Malik
• Jeff Pulver
• Ted Shelton
• Richard Stastny

So I have the honour to share the panel with some uber-mega value bloggers (as uber-mega value friend James Enck likes to put it ;-).

I am looking forward to see you all.

This day I changed one gear down and took it easy. In the morning I joined the ENUM panel "Connected Numbers that Work", because I had nothing else to do. The panel was moderated by Gary Richenaker (Telcordia and ITU-T SG2 Q.1 chair). The panel consisted of the well known suspects Paul Mockapetris (Nominum), Richard Shockey (Neustar), Eli Katz (XConnect and ITSPA) and Adrian Georguescu (AG-Projects). Since I have heard these presentations already (many times) and did not take any notes and also was not very attentive. Maybe I will come back and comment later if the slides will be available.

The rest of the morning I finalized my presentation for the afternoon panel and also watched the funny video "MS Ipod Parody" - a must see. It describes better than anything else the difference in company cultures. And it also shows that there are still some people with humor at MS, because it is confirmed by MS speaker Tom Pilla that the video was created in-house MS.

After having lunch with Henry Sinnreich, Alan Johnston and Michael Slavitch I went back to give my presentation at the Standards Update Panel. I started with my somewhat provocative presentation about the S4-Syndrome, IMS complexity and Walled Gardens (see various posts), and Who cares about the end-user? Maybe it was more provocative as I originally intended, but I was still a bit upset from yesterdays IMS Panel.

I was followed by Markus Isomaki (Nokia) who gave a bit more serious view on the IMS Standards, but also with some slight critcism.

Phil Zimmerman presented his Zfone, which is IMHO an excellent and easy-to-use solution for secure and encryptet communication. It works on top of standard and well-known SIP clients such as X-Lite, Gizmo and SJphone. Phil, Alan Johnston and Jon Callas submitted also in I-D to standardize ZRTP. It does not rely on any PKI Infrastructure. Zfone is available currently for Mac OS X and Linux, a Windows version is announced for mid-April. I am looking forward. I just wonder how this fits into the LI plans of the governments.

Orit Levin (Microsoft) changed jobs and is now responsible for IPTV. She gave a presentation how IPTV can be implemented in IMS, making it even more complex. The S4 Syndrome is speading.

Cullen Jennings (Cisco) summarized the current developments in IETF of security.

Update: Christine is also reporting about this panel

Then I called it a day, after a coffee and a chat with Espen Fjogstad (Telio) on his plans in the mobile arena I went back to the hotel, to have some rest and prepare for Jeff's All Conference Party today, basically to get my ear-plugs ;-)

Sorry for the delayed post, but Blogger is experiencing serious troubles

After the IMS desaster I went to the last session of the day: General session: Peer to Peer SIP, and I was back to normal. This panel was top-class, basically a peek-preview of next IETF week in Dallas (also in the audience): David Bryan, Henry Sinnreich, Henning Schulzrinne, Alan Johnston, Cullen Jennings and Willi Wimmreuter, basically the creme de la creme of P2P SIP, in the audience lurking Rohan Mahy, Brad Templeton, Karl Stahl and others. Also the presentations where well coordinated, godfather Henry setting the scene, Henning, Alan and David providing the details, Willi giving the view of a manufacturer providing already early products, and finally Cullen speaking about naming and identity problems to be solved.

The vision of P2P SIP is in principle to provide the end-user with an easy to use minimal, self-configuring system, killing most of the (optional) boxes such as proxies, servers, SBC, Softswitches, etc. (= IMS). So the IMS session before was basically done by zombies? Interesting Daves outlook to use P2P not only for communication, but also for configuring e.g. consumer devices at home.

They even want to obsolete the DNS, which I still doubt. Maybe for normal operation such as call set-up, but not for naming and identity. Users will like this, manufactures not (except consumer device manufacturers). Providers? depends what they want to provide. At least you still need broadband access. But services? No, they are built in the devices and you buy them at Walmart, Aldi or Hofer (depending where you live) on display beside the frozen peas (as James Enck put it in the morning).

This panel was outraging - I am fuming. And for this b*llsh*t I skipped the Regulatory Update: International.

In the panel description it was stated: Many carriers are looking to federate their networks to support third party services, but few are paying attention to how the Internet has evolved for these services. Portals on the Internet have shown that the reverse may be the case and the federators maybe the application providers.

There where five panelists and a moderator (Kathleen Jarosinski, Verizon), all of them denying that IMS is a Walled Garden. Either they did not understand the question and the issue, or I did. Some said that IMS is an open standard, anybody can use it, some said that third party providers are free to provide their multi-provider services and applications (ha) and it is basically depending on the business model choosen. The only honest statement was from Dan Steingas (Intel) who said he did not care, it is not his business where IMS is put.

Ok, the title was wrong, it should have been: Will IMS be placed in a Walled Garden?

Coming back to the session description: the Internet was not mentioned at all in the presentations, except on one slide: Torben Warming (Ericcson) had a slide showing 4 (four) walled gardens: the mobile walled garden, the home walled garden, the business walled garden and the Internet Walled Garden. To call the Internet a Walled Garden is a premiere.

We must live on different planets. So I waited for the questions, but first Misses moderator asked the panelists some questions and when the first question out of the audience was taken by somebody else, it was answered by one panelist after the other. I threw the towel and left.

My take: of course the IMS needs not to be in a walled garden, but all implementations I know put the IMS in a walled garden. Because if you would not put it there, you would only need one third of the boxes in the IMS architecture.

And especially for Ericsson: the Internet is NOT a walled garden, it is the street passing the walled gardens.

# posted by Richard : 08:15