Paul Montgomery's article on ADNA and NOIE has appeared in Internet
World.  It's a reasonably good description of the circumstances, but
(of course :-) there's a point I'd like to argue.  The criticisms that
ISOC-AU have had of ADNA have not been over the conflict of interests
of its members.  Our criticisms have consistently been that the problem
with ADNA is:

* no separation of policy and operations
* no explicit public-benefit declaration
* restricted membership, lack of genuine input mechanisms
* no action to bring the existing DNS delegates onto the board in 
  order to bring about community consensus and a smooth transition

But I believe the most essential sticking point out of these has turned
out to be separation of policy and operations.  This is shown clearly
in Peter Gerrand's insistence that because customers want good service
then all SLDs have to become fee-charging.

This is an *operational* consideration, from a registrar who is afraid
of losing clients to other domains, being used to potentially define
a *policy* for those domains.  This is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Policy for an SLD must be completely independent of operational
requirements.  Policy must be set objectively for the benefit of a
specific domain and *by* its own constituency, not for the financial
advantage of commercial registrars.  

This is certainly one of the principles that ISOC-AU has been
"obstinate" about, and frankly, if we weren't, how on earth could we 
be said to be representing the diverse needs of the users, our
constituency?

Kate Lance

(Incidently Paul, for what its worth I'm not network manager at Connect, 
that is Chris Chaundy, though that's not his actual title.  I'm system
manager, ie Unix boxes and services, and have nothing to do with net.au
administration.)