On Fri, 23 Jul 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I have nothing in principle against multiple roots, I just fail to
> understand how this could be a better system than a common root under public
> trust.
While it may have been obvious to other people sooner, it has only fairly
recently become clear to me that "a common root under public trust" is
also a choke point, control of which permits control of the entire
Internet. The DNS wars of the last few years are the result: most of the
various people, organisations, and governments involved in this dispute
are there because they want control of the Internet. The single root
draws them like rotting meat draws flies.
If the twentieth century has any lessons to teach, one of the most
obvious must be that control by any single party is bad.
ICANN is simply an illustration of just how bad it can be. Charitably,
this is a harmless group of gormless dilettantes dabbling in matters that
they don't understand. To the more suspicious of us, it looks a lot like
a conspiracy cooked up between a hodge-podge of certain large
corporations; middle-ranking bureaucrats in Washington, Brussels, and
Geneva; and various unpleasant control freaks.
ICANN was selected by hidden forces, lacks any support from the Internet
community, is trusted by precious few -- but ISOC, the ITU, the IAB, CORE,
and certain elements of the US government and the European Commission have
lined up to support it.
Why? Certainly not because of ICANN's intrinsic worth. It's because all
are convinced that they can control ICANN and through ICANN the Internet.
They see ICANN's lack of legitimacy, its weakness, the ICANN board's
incompetence as positive features: they make ICANN easier to control.
What we, the Internet community, need is a distributed DNS with no
single choke point. We need a formula that moves power away from the
center and towards the edges.
The most powerful factor driving the growth of the Internet has been
the fact that no one central authority has been able to legislate
what is best. In the end, that decision has been made by no one and
everyone.
The nanny forces decided that OSI was better than TCP/IP. They
decided that X400 was the way to go for email. They mandated one
silly thing after another. The Internet community junked these
centrally mandated solutions: the Internet's guiding principle has
always been that what matters is what works.
Esther Dyson's $1 tax on .com domain names may seem harmless. It
isn't. If accepted, it establishes a principle: taxes can be imposed
on the entire Internet and on any particular part of the Internet. Once
this is agreed, we will find that we have created a monster that has the
power to destroy anyone that disagrees with the ICANN board and the
shadowy forces behind it.
The Dyson tax, if accepted, also establishes another principle: we must
bow to the center. It doesn't matter if it works, it doesn't matter if
it makes sense. What matters is what our superiors tell us to do.
We don't need this.
We don't need rule from above: we need an IANA that facilitates
cooperation, not an ICANN that tells us what to do.
We don't need control from the center: we need a recognition that
hundreds of thousands of people working in loose cooperation are
much more intelligent than any small committee.
> I find the analogy with the phone system (as you present it) not fully
> applicable, as the phone number is a "key" in the system, and therefore
> unique due to the way that the system is built, while the domain name is an
> "attribute" of the unique key (the IP address), and therefore could be
> duplicated.
I don't want to dwell on pseudo-technical side-issues but:
You are simply wrong. You have domain names that map into multiple IP
addresses (round-robin DNS) and Web servers with many domain names mapping
into one IP address. The DNS is not 1:1 and it's not 1:N. It is N:N.
The telephone directory system and the DNS are two very different things;
a telco background does not qualify you to pontificate on Internet issues.
--
Jim Dixon Managing Director
VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316
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