Specifically, it must do everything within its power to establish the Supporting Organizations, and ensure the election of nine board members by those Organizations to begin serving at the November 1999 Board Meeting. And it must work diligently to complete the process for electing at-large directors by June 2000. That will ensure that this important decision is made in accordance with the representative, bottom-up process called for in the White Paper.
Transparency is critical to establishing trust in decision making.
NSI's view is very clear. The Commerce Department believes just as strongly that NSI does not have the legal right to operate these domains in the authoritative root in perpetuity. We believe that all or part of the functions now performed by NSI under the Cooperative Agreement could be reassigned through a competition and, unless NSI won the competition, it would cease to have any legal right to provide the recompeted services. And even if that were not so, an NSI unconstrained under U.S. law would quickly become a target of action by other countries in order to protect consumers against the exercise of market power. We have been able to reach agreement with NSI in the past each time it has been necessary to do so in order to enable the DNS process to move forward.