At 10:32 PM 7/23/99 +0100, Jim Dixon wrote:
>
>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.
The following is copied from a post of mine of 7/21/99:
____________
What was the fundamental operating principle of the ARPA net?
Not its purpose: that was to exchance scientific and technical
data relating to federal research. The operating principle was
that was to be multi-redundant: no reasonable collection of
nuclear weapons hits could knock it out.
What do we have now? NSI gets tangled up in its own web and
systems go down. If .com drops, commerce drops. If NSI yanks
the Whois by its arbitrary practices, nobody knows who anybody
is.
Multi-roots solves the problem of access to the DNS; redundant
DNS, as in a network of well known mirror sites, solves the problem
of domain name lookup.
___________
To which I would now add that one dunderhead at NSI now has more
power than the combined nuclear forces of the former Soviet Union.
Bill Lovell
