N-1-3-012.30.2, "DIGI - Forging Ahead in Germany", by Dave Morton*, 
<David.Morton@ECRC.DE>


DIGI e.V. - the German Internet users' group (Deutsche Interessen-
gemeinschaft Internet e.V) has finally been legally constituted under
German law.  An unfortunate delay in the legal registration of the
society was caused by an over zealous civil servant at the court who
noticed that the required abbreviation "e.V" (i.e., society) was
missing from our charter.  This oversight has since been rectified and
the registration court, to our relief, has finally declared DIGI a
full legal entity.

Since then, the DIGI e.V. office in Munich is being inundated with
information and membership requests as well as with registrations for
DIGI's first conference which will take place also in Munich between
the 9-12 November 1992, in the Marriott Hotel.  A number of prominent
speakers from the US and Europe will be in attendance as well as many
of the active members of the community from Germany itself.  26
tutorials will also be held during the first two days and the demand
for these indicates the growing interest and need for information in
Germany concerning the Internet and Internet technology in general.

DIGI has also been active in other areas as well, amongst others, with
its proposal for the formation of a working commission to specify and
publish a call for tender for the services of a DE-NIC.  This has met
with overwhelming support from almost all quarters of the user
community.  DIGI intends to make public the specifications, the call
for tender, as well the guidelines for evaluation and acceptance.
DIGI intends to ensure that a neutral instance of a DE-NIC is
established so that stable operation of current DE-NIC can be
continued for the benefit of the whole community.

The current DE-NIC token holder, the University of Dortmund, is
increasingly having to face the problem of an ever growing user
community requiring DE-NIC support.  The University alone cannot be
expected to provide the required financial, manpower and other
necessary resources to continue providing the service.  The University
receives no government support whatsoever for this activity and the
work of the current DE-NIC has until now been carried out on a
voluntary no cost basis for the whole of German Internet community.
Starting January 1991, service providers DFN and EUnet provided
funding for DE-NIC each for a limited period of time; but no sort of
stable funding was agreed.  This situation cannot continue
indefinitely and therefore a solution was perceived to be urgently
necessary.  Thus the DIGI initiative to form the DE-NIC Commission in
order to establish a solid DE-NIC on a sound financial basis for the
future.

On the initiative of DIGI, the three current service providers, DFN,
EUnet and XLINK, have agreed to an interim financing model for 1992.
This agreement was hammered out by DIGI officials and representatives
of the service providers during the CeBIT Hannover Fair trade show in
March of this year.  A longer term solution was discussed as well.
The financing model, called the "Hannover Model" is based on a points
matrix of service providers and their customers, and thus a fair
division of the costs based on the existing domains in Germany.

The DE-NIC commission has since been established with a broad and open
membership which foresees participation of the current DE-NIC token
holder, the current service providers, representatives of the DFN/WiN
planning group (i.e., the German X.25 R&D network), representatives of
commercial (i.e., non-academic Internet participants), a
representative of the RIPE NCC, as well as representatives of the DIGI
board and the DIGI DE-NIC advisory council.  The commission has met
three times since its establishment at the beginning of July and much
progress has been made in formulating both the technical details, but
more importantly, the legal and administrative framework for the call
for tender and for the eventual contract and implementation.  A number
of legal and financial hurdles will still need clarification and a
formal handover of the DE-NIC token to DIGI e.V. will need to be
negotiated as well.  The commission will shortly be publishing the
results of its deliberations.  We expect to obtain valuable feedback
from colleagues on the Internet which can then be fed back into fine
tuning the process.  We hope to report on the commission's progress in
the next issue.

The DIGI DE-NIC commission is doing pioneering work in this problem
area which our US colleagues are fortunate in not having to face.  We
believe that many other countries have or will shortly have similar
problems with NICs and we hope very much that the work of the
commission can help other countries as well in the proper and neutral
organisation of their NICs.


*DIGI e.V./European Computer-Industry Research Centre