april_2009_ssac_report

Over the last month a sub-committee of SSAC, which the ALAC liaison joined, discussed a draft plan for enhancing Internet Security, stability and Resiliency, written by ICANN staff at the request of the Board. There were several teleconferences and list discussions to suggest improvements to the initial draft. The document submitted to the Board incorporated most of them. The Board needed to approve the posting of the plan for Public Comment at its April 23rd meeting.

The SSAC also discussed the report on the RSSAC review. Among the topics that emerged was the economics of the root zone servers, in the light of the addition of a lot of new top level domains, IPv6 and DNSSEC. They all has implications on bandwidth, hardware, maintenance, and ultimately cost for the root server operators. Right now, they have no contractual relationship with anyone and perform the service pro bono. However, if the root zone file grows to the point that it has a sizeable effect on their infrastructure, some may be tempted to recover the costs. Who would then have to pay for this is unclear. However, this would imply a contract between parties, which many people would like to avoid.