RE $50 Million NSF windfall??

[Jim Fleming]

On Thursday, March 13, 1997 10:43 AM, John Curran[SMTP:jcurran at bbnplanet.com] wrote:
<snip>
@ >This situation was predicted months ago. When
@ >the InterNIC was started THREE functions were
@ >defined, IS, DS, and RS.  
@ 
@ There was an NSF review panel which assessed the 
@ performance of the InterNIC overall and by the 
@ specific contractors.  I believe this led to 
@ changes in the award tasking, but as I was not 
@ involved, this is entirely supposition on my part.
@ 
@ Before leaping to conclusions about the IS phaseout,
@ you might want to hunt down the review panel report.
@ I would doubt if the IS change has had any material
@ impact on performance of the other tasking.
@ 

John,

I think that you can dispense with words like
"leaping" and "capricious". I have read the review
panel report many, many times. I have also studied
all of the NSF InterNIC documents carefully during
the past 16 months.

You might be interested to know that the documents
used to be easy to find on the InterNIC's web site.
Sometime back in the late 1995, the site was reorganized
to showcase more of the AT&T presence and the
hypertext links to the key documents disappeared from
the obvious places and still appear in obscur places.

Here is a piece of the review. I think it is very kind
to the NSF. Note that the bottom line is that the NSF
was advised to hire experts and not to wait 2 years to
make a decision. Once again, we are approaching
the 2 year mark from the time that charging for domain
names heated up, just after SAIC bought NSI.

Midterm Evaluation
	<http://www.rs.internic.net/nsf/review/review-toc.html>
	"The InterNIC awards set the precedent of requiring significant
	self-coordination among a team of awardees, and requiring outreach
	to other Network Information Centers. The panel suggests that the
	NSF critically consider whether it is viable to expect significant
	self-coordination among a team of awardees in future awards.
	The panel also notes that the NSF's program management was
	not able to correct GA's problems early on despite excellent efforts
	by the NSF staff, primarily because the NSF staff were overextended
	by monitoring at least two major projects (the InterNIC and the
	NSFNET backbone) at once. The panel recommends that for future
	large scale efforts in the rapidly changing Internet environment, the
	NSF should form an ongoing advisory panel of outside experts or
	employ some external consultants to help manage such cooperative
	agreements, rather than waiting two years to call for a review."

With respect to IS, DS, and RS. I would
suggest that you closely study the merits
of that InterNIC "model". I have.

Also, you might want to ask people at
the InterNIC about that model. You might
be surprised to find that some do not even
know it exists. Why ? Because RS has
essentially taken over the entire operation
which was not the original intent.

That was clearly NSI's recommendation back in 1992.
Again, I assume that you have read all of the
NSF InterNIC documents.
	<http://rs.internic.net/nsf/nis/proposal-toc.html>
		"Network Solutions believes NSF's objectives will be met
		most effectively by the award of the bulk of the services to
		a single contractor."

The issues at play in these forums are not
about the technical differences in domain names
and IP addresses. The issues are about the
business management of the key Internet
resources that companies need to make the
"net work".

In order to understand those management issues
you have to study contracts and agreements and
business documents and business management
not RFCs.


--
Jim Fleming
Unir Corporation

e-mail:
JimFleming at unety.net
JimFleming at unety.s0.g0 (EDNS/IPv8)