RE: [idn] draft-klensin-dns-role-00.txt and the author's presentation

["Brian W. Spolarich" <briansp@walid.com>]

James Seng wrote:

| c) Lets go for a truely distributed structure with no
| centralized registry model. No place to have control or politics (lets all 
| give ICANN a break), but no place for monopoly either. This is more of a
| architecture change rather than protocol tho.

  This sounds like more of the 'alternate root' stuff that's been
discussed on the MINC list. :-)

  I think that the concept of having 'no place to have control or
politics' is untenable.  Anything that is important to humans has
the potential to become a source of conflict, especially if that
thing is finite in some way.  While it certainly does have its
problems, the single root of the DNS and the entities which 
administer it have enabled the Internet to remain an inter-net, and
not a collection of partitioned and disconnected networks (routing
flaps aside).

  The primary design goal of the DNS is to provide a consistent 
name space for referring to resources [RFC1034, Section 2.2, Item 1].  
This has fundamental implications about architecture and protocol design
(they are not really inseparable in my mind).  Do you believe that this
goal is no longer applicable, or as important as the sqabblings in
and around ICANN?  Can you achieve a single namespace without some
central point of 'control' (a synonym for which is "operate").  That
central point can be distributed in various ways for scalability or
other purposes, but at some point in your design if you want a single
namespace it seems to me you need a single point of control.

  I can understand and sympathize with some of the sentiments behind
this, but this feels like a 'throw the baby out with the bathwater'
kind of idea.

  I wonder at the cultural implications of some of these approaches
as well.  For example, the unified name resolution space of the 
DNS means that any name is resolvable from anywhere, and any resource
can (modulo network access controls, filtering, firewalls, etc.)
be reached from anywhere.  These 'alternate root' proposals seem to
play into the hands of those who would want to limit the ability of
humans to access certain kinds of information resources, for whatever
purpose.

  -bws