Craig, you wrote to me a few months ago and i'm finally getting back to it:
> Now, I consider you to be a strong defender of maintaining a single
> root. At least, I'm sure you once were. I have missive of yours from way
> back (from [EMAIL PROTECTED] 28 October 1996) that I consider to be as
> forceful a statement as any about why a coherent DNS is a good idea. I also
> take it as representative of your fundamental ideology about the how the
> Internet should be managed, and for what purpose.
>
> Please look it over and let us know if you still stand by those views, and
> please add whatever you might feel is appropriate on this topic.
I absolutely do.
> Subject: Re: bogosity
> Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 13:55:04 -0800
> From: Paul A Vixie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> [ notes about root-64 being a fun experiment and about how i'm
> taking all of this way too seriously. ]
>
> > >are not in this for your revolution, man, they're in it for the money.
> >
> > and what are you in it for?
>
> I have a political agenda. That's why I'm in the Internet field at all;
> I used to be a programmer who held his head high around other programmers.
> Now I'm writing RFCs and hacking BIND. Why? Because it scares the hell
> out of the Chinese government. And the Singaporean government. And my
> own U.S. government. People with ready access to accurate information
> cannot be oppressed. With no counter influence, the average knuckle dragging
> hairless ape will try to oppress his or her fellows as a matter of course --
> this is human nature. I am a counter influence. I don't like the raw form
> of human nature and I am trying to give individuals the tools they need to
> avoid information oppression by their fellows.
>
> I don't think root-64 is the right way to do that. In fact root-64 looks
> like it will destabilize the network and make the whole thing work less well,
> setting the information revolution back a few years or maybe a full cycle.
> You people arguing about the right of people everywhere to have whatever
> domain names they want are missing, and I mean entirely missing, the point.
> These names need to be distinguishing -- slightly meaningful and very unique.
> There needs to be just one authoritative source of information about any
> given name, whether it be VIX.COM or "." or MCS.NET. Anything you do to
> make this less true is like handing machine guns to those knuckle dragging
> hairless apes I spoke of earlier. Chaos is inimical to freedom. The order
> you see me fighting for is the status quo, because I believe that the true
> fight for freedom lies in content rather than naming. Without coherent names
> we won't be able to locate the content I'm so worried about. Coherency is
> not free and it's never an accident.
Paul Vixie
October 1999
